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bo x 







THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 



SCIENTIFIC ASPECT 



THREE LECTURES GIVEN BEFORE STUDENTS 
OF THE SEVERAL DEPARTMENTS AT 
KING'S COLLEGE, LONDON, JUNE, 1902 



THE RELIGIOUS 
SENSE IN ITS 
SCIENTIFIC ASPECT 

By GREVILLE MACDONALD, M.D. 



To be still searching what we know not by what we know, 
still closing up truth to truth as we find it, this is the golden 
rule. — Milton. 



NEW YORK 

A. C ARMSTRONG AND SON 

3 and 5 WEST EIGHTEENTH STREET 

London : HODDER AND STOUGHTON 

1903 



&^f 



• 0* 



We have still one request left. We have at least reflected 
and taken pains in order to render our propositions not only 
true, but of easy and familiar access to men's minds, however 
wonderfully prepossessed and limited. Yet it is but just that 
we should obtain this favour from mankind (especially in so 
great a restoration of learning and the sciences), that whoso- 
ever may be desirous of forming any determination upon an 
opinion of this our work either from his own perceptions, 
or the crowd of authorities, or the forms of demonstrations, 
he will not expect to be able to do so in a cursory manner, 
and whilst attending to other matters ; but in order to have 
a thorough knowledge of the subject, will himself by degrees 
attempt the course which we describe and maintain ; will be 
accustomed to the subtilty of things which is manifested by 
experience ; and will correct the depraved and deeply rooted 
habits of his mind by a seasonable and as it were just hesi- 
tation : and then finally (if he will) use his judgment when 
he has begun to be master of himself. — Bacon's Novwji 
Organum (concluding paragraph to Preface). 



TO MY FATHER 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

SYNOPSIS IX 



LECTURE I 

THE RELIGION OF SERVICE .... I 

LECTURE II 

THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION . . 79 

LECTURE III 

THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM . . . l6l 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



To face page 

Plate I. The Foraminifera . . . 51 



„ II. The Spongilla . . . .53 

„ III. Venus's Flower-Basket ... 54 

„ IV. The Daisy 107 

„ V. The Guelder-Rose . . . .121 

,, VI. The Pearly Nautilus . . . 219 



SYNOPSIS 



LECTURE I 

THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 

All thought that is not confined to bread-winning 
is philosophy. If, to acquire wisdom, we labour in 
the fields of knowledge, we are serving ideals that 
transcend the claims of utilitarianism. But knowledge 
is not wisdom. 

(i) This desire for understanding is but seeking 
simplification of the complex. Simplification consists 
in classification of facts and phenomena and their rele- 
gation to law. All philosophers and scientists are 
driven to their work by the old question, "What is 
Truth ? " The child seeking education in his infantile 
questions, and the philosopher teaching his wisdom, 
are united in their desire for simplification of phe- 
nomena and classification of facts. The relation of 
poetry to science. 

(2) The brotherhood of all life. The law of 
Heraclitus is now substantiated, and expresses in idea 
the law of evolution. All that life owns is through 
inheritance. 

(3) Like all other human attributes, the religious 
sense is an inheritance from mighty small beginnings, 



x SYNOPSIS 

else is man a special creation : a theory we cannot 
study biology and hold. Like other faculties, such 
as love and reason, it may be passive or active ; its 
possessor may be unconscious of it or conscious. The 
religious sense prevails throughout creation, evolving, 
like everything else, from small beginnings to high 
on-goings. The religious sense not separable in idea 
from the ethical sense. The religious or ethical sense 
may be defined as the passive or active acceptation 
of the Law's demands of service that transcends the 
immediate needs of individual or community. The 
relation of the social to the religious sense is not one 
of identity, but of evolution. The relation of each of 
these to personal obligation is also one of evolution. 

(4) Classification of the proposed lectures. The first 
deals with the story of the simplest social life, that 
of the sponge, and shows how each individual in the 
community serves self, the community and the unknown 
Law in which it has being : thus it deals with the 
Religion of Service. The second deals with the mani- 
festation of the Law in the renunciation of self-interest, 
and shows how the beautiful comprises obedience to 
Law, and thus reveals the truth of the religious sense. 
The third lecture discusses the Religion of Freedom, 
and shows how, through Man's emancipation from the 
chains of the Law, he attains greater power to fulfil 
the Law, although through this same freedom comes 
his possibility of degradation. 

(5) The properties of the primordial protoplasm in 
relation to physical forces. It holds all the essential 
properties of life — growth, procreation, death. The 
lowly forms of life prove that structure is not respon- 
sible for function, but rather that function designs 
structure. It is the idea of form and function that is 



SYNOPSIS xi 

transmitted ; and upon the strength of this inheritance 
amoeba and man build their structure. The shell- 
forms of the organless foraminifera. 

(6) The structure of the spongilla fluviatilis — a colony 
of individual workers, each intent upon the service of 
self, the service of the community, and the service 
of the Law, whose purposes transcend these humbler 
functions. The sponge's moat and walls, its citadel 
and streets, its masons and sweepers. The indi- 
vidual's life consists in each being intent upon its 
work: and its work is divine so far as it thrives in 
obedience to the Law of its cause. 

(7) The elemental beginnings of the religious sense 
no more necessitate self-consciousness than do the 
beginnings of reason or other human attributes. Yet 
we ourselves can no more dissociate the religious 
sense from self-consciousness than we can altogether 
separate the faculty of seeing from thought concerning 
objects seen. But the elements of consciousness must 
have been present in the primordial protoplasm, else 
man could not have been evolved from it. Anthropo- 
morphism. But, if the sponge-sarcode possesses 
all the elemental properties of man, must we accord 
it a soul? We do not belittle the oak-tree because 
of its beginning in the acorn ; nor is man's soul the 
less because its possibility lay dimly in a particle of 
primordial protoplasm. The difference between the 
protoplasmic mason and man is this, that man's soul 
is in part free, and thus responsible to the Law for 
his labour, while the sponge-sarcode's is wholly captive 
to the Law, and thrives in a passive obedience. 



xii SYNOPSIS 

LECTURE II 

THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 

(i) Further consideration as to the reality of the 
religious sense, which, it may be objected, must be 
conscious and voluntary in its exercise. Yet the eye 
of a fish is the same organ as the eye of a man, 
though mere passivity is the mental counterpart of 
the former, and imagination the ideal equivalent of the 
other. Objections of theology and pure science met. 
The religious sense implies bondage between life and 
the unknown : it is ethical because it implies obli- 
gation. While the bondage is most manifest in lowly 
forms of life, the ethical obligation is most susceptible 
of demonstration in man because of his freedom. 
There are three standpoints in the evolution of the 
religious sense as a vital equivalent : (i) Egoism ; 
(ii) Altruism ; (iii) Transcendentalism ; and each leads 
up to and merges into that above it in imperceptible 
steps of gradation. 

(2) In this lecture it will be shown (a) that obedience 
to the Law manifests itself in terms of beauty, and 
(b) that renunciation of self-service is definitely pro- 
claimed as essential in the sense of religion. The 
theory offered is the old one of the poet that Beauty 
is Truth, is the revelation of the Law. Thus will 
it be found that Religion and Beauty are inseparable, 
and that the ethical is not far removed from the 
aesthetic. Why Beauty is not always manifest in things 
that live in obedience. 

(3) Story of the Daisy. Renunciation is no mere 
fancy woven in the complex fabric of our environment, 



SYNOPSIS xiii 

but pervades all Nature. We find illustration of this 
fact in two communities of flowers : (a) the daisy ; 
(J?) the wild guelder-rose. In the former certain indi- 
viduals have relinquished some privileges further to 
serve ; in the latter we find more complete renunciation 
of the privilege of work in fulfilling the Law's needs. 
The daisy's work in handing onwards the torch of life 
in its own special form, and how it comes to shine in 
beauty. The function of beauty. As the daisy de- 
clares in beauty the ethical equivalent of its being, so 
does all right living shine in colour and symmetry. 
Duty lies at the very root of life, and is not an instru- 
ment for saving souls. The relation of the daisy's 
renunciation to utility and the social sense. 

(4) Story of the wild guelder-rose. Its beauty due 
to those sentinel members of its loosely tied com- 
munity which have relinquished all work. How, then, 
do they manifest the truth and serve the Law in their 
beauty ? The ideality of beauty implies a wider range 
of reality than is comprehended in our systems, for 
Beauty proclaims its utility in revealing the depths of 
light. Yet to feel something of beauty is a better 
gift than to prove beauty to be the expression of 
the Law. 

(5) The relation of utility to ethics and aesthetics. 
Two questions must be answered: (i) one from the 
scientists, and (ii) one from the idealists. The former 
claim that the flowers' beauty is but utilitarian, and 
is accomplished through the insects' selection and 
crossing of the most favoured specimens. They also 
assert that morality is but the law of social advantage. 
And they challenge contradiction. The idealist, on the 
contrary, asks whether the ideal of beauty and morals 
is not degraded by arguments which seek to prove 



xiv SYNOPSIS 

that both are primarily utilitarian, even if, at the same 
time, they are held to transcend mundane needs. 

(6) The scientist's utilitarianism is only to be 
answered by showing the limitations of his facts, and 
how even he cannot escape asking questions which 
his facts fail to explain : otherwise he falls back on 
the term accident, which, as the antithesis to Law, 
should be the rankest of heresies to the law-seeker. 
Yet must it be conceded that both morals and beauty 
are utilitarian, though the extent of their service cannot 
be measured. 

(7) The flower, says the idealist, is beautiful only 
because it transcends its obligation to its species 
and the needs of insect-conveyers of pollen, while 
the very essence of virtue lies in its disinterested- 
ness. In answer this objector is asked to conceive of 
a system of morality or of beauty that shall be devoid 
of utilitarian intent. Virtue is not the less pure that 
it inevitably brings its reward, nor beauty less true 
that it is a revelation of the Law. 

(8) Last word on the Religion of Renunciation. 
There is no hardship or cruelty in Nature so long as 
renunciation is in favour of the Law's intent. Even 
in the survival of the strong and falling away of the 
weak there is no cruelty, provided the Law is served 
in its high intent. 



SYNOPSIS xv 

LECTURE III 

THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 

(i) Final words on the Reality of the Religious Sense. 
The two objections to it — (a) that, because many do not 
possess it, the sense is not real, and {b) that it is merely 
an artificial product of an artificial environment, {a) If 
the former be just, there is no further argument, because 
we are not agreed as to our data. But the sense is a 
vital force in all who do not oppose the Law in vice, 
luxury, or cynicism. Instances in proof of this claim. 
(3) The second objection is too foolish to need answer 
to the scientific, who understand the meaning and 
influence of environment, which, never generating 
anything, is but the soil, good or bad, in which things 
are able to assert their vitality. 

(2) Yet the religious sense appears to have de- 
generated in man, whereas it should, prima facie, give 
extended manifestation with his increase of attainment. 
The disaster has befallen man because of the lack of 
inspiration in his work, and because his sense of need 
in and obligation to the Law has waned. 

(3) Is not this, then, failure on the part of the Law 
which should give us inspiration? The question 
expresses the whole difficulty of those who could 
believe in God but for sin and suffering. It must 
be answered fearlessly and truthfully, or faith is not 
possible. The Law needs for its higher work labourers 
that are freed of their chains. If they be still chained, 
like sponge and guelder-rose, no higher evolution in 
individual, society, or work were possible. Because 
of man's freedom comes the possibility of wrong-doing. 



xvi SYNOPSIS 

The story of the Bee, to whom virtue and vice are 
alike impossible. 

(4) The Fable of the Chess-players who carved their 
own men. The story of the evolution of Sin and the 
advent of the Perfect Man, who sacrificed all for the 
Will of His Master. 

(5) Freedom the final outcome of our growth in 
the religious sense. Thus is the religious sense in- 
separable from political advance, if both seek Freedom. 
Follows a historical clue to the study of our religion 
and our democracy. Stephen Langton; Simon de 
Montfort ; the days of the Tudors ; the Revolution ; 
the Royal Society as cradle of the newborn freedom 
in Science. All movement in progress has come 
because some have been strong enough to justify their 
faith in ideals that transcend advantage. Martin 
Luther. 

(6) The principles of protestantism are those of 
freedom, and are inseparable from those of democracy. 
In speaking of principles one does not imply theo- 
logical dogmas or political codes, but the power 
which begins and continues any movement. Indi- 
vidualism forms the basis of Christianity, the spirit ot 
protestantism, and the aim of democracy. All these 
are opposed to clericalism and socialism. 

(7) Last words to show that the idea of Freedom 
is in no sense inimical to that of obligation or of 
obedience. The vulgar idea of Freedom reduced to its 
logical absurdity. The whole conception of Freedom 
is opportunity to grow. Freedom is distinct from 
licence, power from tyranny, charity from self-interested 
altruism, and egoism from self-seeking. The growth of 
Freedom is the freeing of Power. Neither can stand 
save in obedience to their inherent prospective intent. 



The Religion of Service 



I 

THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 

It is not my intention to discuss the 
academic philosophies, although you may 
suppose that a subject such as the religious 
sense calls for some recognition of the work 
done by great thinkers. I even disclaim any 
deep study of many writers who have sought 
to elucidate the mystery surrounding our life 
in its relation to the mighty Cause. And yet 
I claim fellowship with all the philosophers, 
just as everyone who, wondering at his own 
power as contrasted with its limits, or re- 
garding the eternal in relation to man's brief 

3 



i 



4 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

opening of eye upon its revelations, knows 
that it is his duty, if he would justify his 
soul, to ask great questions. For herein, 
you will perceive, Man is exalted into a 
dignity far transcending his supposed right 
to get the utmost satisfaction out of his life. 
Many of us are driven to face the world 
with an enquiry that probes deeper than its 
surface-pile of custom and respectability. 
We find that to live in true manliness we 
must labour in the fields of human nature, 
and accept all things, sweet or sour, of hope 
or despair, as our food. We are compelled, 
I say, to accept as necessary to us conditions 
and ideas that, according to the mere political 
economist or utilitarian, do not concern our 
welfare. In other words, we must admit that 
obligations urge all of us who seek wisdom 
to recognise and overcome difficulties that, 
for our so-called peace of mind, were better 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 5 

ignored, and, so far as our worldly success 
is concerned, had best be set aside. 

I shall, then, speak to you about things 
that we admit have no practical bearing 
upon the necessities of life, — as these are 
counted by some who hold the object of 
work to be the making of money and the 
buying of ease. In our leanings to deep 
thought, and in our hard study to understand 
that which is beyond the facts of our daily 
labour, we tacitly, .though most potently, 
proclaim our obligation to justify the soul 
of man in its high endeavours. If we 
strive, as the great ones of the earth have 
ever striven, to better society and fertilise 
man's higher impulses, we are but admitting 
that transcendental ideals, however little we 
are able to define their import, are strong 
within us. We admit that all great thought 
in the world is inspired by such ideal forces, 



6 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

even though many seek to belittle their 
influence upon us. The fact that vague 
intuitions of grand possibilities are ever 
stronger in moving individual and society 
to noble action than the grim facts of daily 
necessities is in itself strong evidence that 
the origin of such ideals lies in a world 
or atmosphere of eternal truth. And we, 
whether we are but weary men and women 
or are hope-inspired poets ; whether we are 
seeking light by acquiring knowledge or are 
hidden from the sun in the mines of com- 
merce ; one and all of us are more deeply 
concerned in our relation to that which 
we must admit to be unknown than in 
our worship of success and intellect we can 
understand. 

I confess, though I would make all men 
philosophers, that I do not attach much value 
to the study of systems of philosophy. 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 7 

Nevertheless, we may well believe the 
wisdom of the ancients to be of higher 
worth than the mere scientific knowledge 
of our own day : wisdom is more than know- 
ledge because it necessarily deals with the 
transcendental and ethical rather than with 
mundane facts and necessities. The systems 
of philosophy are of historic and academic 
interest rather than of practical importance : 
they are the dead languages of great minds, 
although they lived and bore fruit in virtue 
of that same eternal spirit of enquiry which, 
I say, must be stirring in some measure 
even yourselves and myself, or we should 
not be here assembled. But in this day 
our method of intellectual labour is changed, 
chiefly because the materials offered to us 
for such labour are so greatly increased. 
Nevertheless, as the dead languages, which 
we now study because of their scientific 



8 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

and academic interest rather than for their 
utility, once lived in virtue of the same 
human needs that still make language neces- 
sary, so the old systems of philosophy 
dealt with the same eternal questions that 
still beset us in changing form, but with 
unchanging spirit. And if we accept our 
new fields for cultivation and our new 
ploughs for upturning their soil in the 
spirit of a humble farmer who, though 
striving with Nature, yet waits upon her 
ministrations, we shall, I believe, discover 
that the eternal truths are ever revealing 
themselves. 

Though knowledge is not wisdom, and 
science, because of its limitations, is not truth, 
every new fact that is acquired must be ac- 
cepted as a gem holding fit and essential place 
in the eternal cosmos. We are often tempted 
to reject facts if they contradict our cherished 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 9 

traditions ; but, if we are real students and 
not mere searchers for philosophers' stones, 
we shall accept everything that is given us 
because holding in its heart some measure 
of revelation. No jewelled insect shining 
for a day, no mammoth buried for a small 
eternity, no new example of the dependence 
of life upon physical forces, can do other 
than increase our determination to find new 
food for our deeper learning. If, moreover, 
we accept the facts offered us by the men 
of science in a spirit more reverential than 
is sometimes evinced by their philosophic 
effronteries, we shall, I believe, gain more 
for our religion, if it is sincere, than we 
can at present imagine. 

I seek in these lectures to tell you the 
true nature of what is commonly understood 
by the term the religious sense. Before I 
have done you will believe that this sense 



io THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

is as real as any other of our senses or 
emotions, as real as any of our intellectual 
faculties. And please observe this at the 
outset : I shall not help you to accredit this 
religious sense by belittling it, but by exalt- 
ing it, although we shall perhaps best grasp 
its reality by searching for and finding its 
elemental beginnings. But we have to clear 
some ground, whether because it lies fallow 
or gives life to that which cumbers it, 
before we can go straight forward in our 
husbandry. 

In this lecture I am going to show you 
in the first place (i) that all understanding 
depends upon simplification, and that the 
simplification of phenomena consists in 
relegating them to the law responsible for 
them ; and in the second (ii) that the law of 
life is pervaded by a marvellous uniformity 
of method and purpose, which becomes more 



- 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE n 

apparent as we acquire knowledge, and that 
this law enfolds all creation in a mighty 
brotherhood or sharing of inheritance. Next, 
(iii) in affirming that the religious sense 
exists germinally in all forms of life, I shall 
define it. Then, (iv) after giving you a 
classification of my lectures, I shall proceed 
(v) to tell you of certain primordial forms 
of life, and (vi) to show you how we find 
indisputable evidence of an embryonic re- 
ligious sense in such lowly forms of animal 
life as the sponge. Lastly, (vii) I shall 
show you how we may define the difference 
between a sponge and Man, especially in 
relation to this religious sense. 

(i). All thought that transcends the daily 
toil has, I take it, but one object in view — 
viz. to understand ; and this desire for 
understanding will always resolve itself into a 
simplification of things that appear complex. 



12 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

To put it in more ordinary terms, every- 
one who asks a question dealing with the 
abstract seeks an expression or definition of 
some law that will explain the phenomenon 
exciting the enquiry. Even the child 
who first looks upon an opening daisy 
sees in it a revelation of some hitherto 
unsuspected wonder, and seeks to find its 
parallel among his small experiences. Tell 
such child that the daisy unfolds its bud 
because it cannot help it, and he may be 
silenced ; but he is not enlightened by a 
stupid formulation of a fact that was suffi- 
ciently obvious. Tell him, on the other hand, 
as a wise mother would, that the flower 
blows because God wished it to do so, and 
he immediately finds himself confronted with 
an ethical law which he understands because 
it is the same bond which connects parental 
authority and his own actions ; his budding 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 13 

desire for understanding is satisfied because 
of this simplification of his facts. And I 
maintain that such a reply to a child is 
truly scientific in spirit, although the rever- 
ential mother, in so speaking, is altogether 
ignorant of the evolution of the flower or 
of botanical classification. To tell a child 
that a flower buds because it cannot do 
otherwise is an infamous snub to his small 
philosophic heart ; to tell him that God made 
him and the flower that they should both 
do His will and justify Him in making them, 
points out to the child the great truth that 
there is uniformity in law between him 
and the daisy, and that they own a common 
parentage in that power which, in its integral 
embrace of the universe, we are justified in 
calling divine. 

Concerning this uniformity of Nature I 
shall have much to say as we proceed. At 



14 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

the moment I am content to suggest to you 
that the instinct of the child is always one 
of brotherhood towards each new experience 
of life as it rushes into his eager mind. He 
kisses the flowers, runs after the birds with 
outstretched arms to embrace them, hugs 
the kitten in tender fellowship. All things are 
part of his life, and the more of them he 
possesses in fine intelligence and loving 
fellowship, the bigger grows his life. To 
me such phenomena are but the instinctive 
knowledge of natural truth that abounds in 
the simple-minded, but which the philosopher 
ignores, partly because he forgets many 
worthy things, partly because he is over- 
whelmed with minor knowledge. And in 
the child's questionings we perceive indica- 
tions of what we call the scientific spirit. 
For, having collected his facts, he seeks 
to classify and simplify them by a law 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 15 

that shall prove common to all of them. 
Such innate sense of the scientific is indeed 
the basis of all mental action : as soon as we 
select, from the ever unwinding concatenation 
of facts presented to our mind, individual 
items that possess a common cause or con- 
tribute to a similar effect, we have mental 
action as distinct from mere automatism ; 
and we simplify. The indolent watching of 
events, however intent the consciousness may 
be, does not constitute thought : mental 
action lies in the scientific understanding of 
the relation of events to one another, however 
distant they may seem to be ; and this 
association arises from an innate desire for 
simplification. Thus I am justified in affirm- 
ing that a germinal scientific spirit is evinced 
by the child asking questions about a daisy 
because he would assign it a place of fellow- 
ship alongside of his own budding self. And 



16 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

I shall presently show you that the religious 
sense is even more definitely germinal in 
all forms of life. 

In the same desire for simplification of 
phenomena, the philosopher has ever sought 
a law that should explain all things: and 
not the less so that his systems are com- 
plicated and his conclusions hard to under- 
stand. The question throughout all time has 
ever been that of Pilate, " What is Truth ? " 
Every philosopher has asked that question 
as the reason for his work, knowing that, 
when he found the answer, all laws and 
systems, all conflicts of right and wrong, 
would stand revealed in an indisputable 
simplicity. And to-day we in our fuller 
knowledge still ask, What is Truth ? though 
we seek but the simplification of facts. The 
simplification of all chemical processes lies 
in Dalton's atomic theory; the wonders of 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 17 

the heavens are all harmonized in the laws 
of Newton and the theories of La Place ; 
the history of evolution is comprised in 
the hypotheses of Lamark, Darwin, and 
Weissmann ; and so on. The desire of the 
scientific man is the desire of the philosopher ; 
but the latter is more passionately desirous 
of understanding Man and the law that 
accounts for, governs, and frees him, while 
the scientist, his desires not reaching beyond 
his immediate environment of facts, finds 
content in the acknowledgment of his 
limitations. 

And in this place I am anxious, for reasons 
that will before long become apparent, to 
show that there is yet another class of man 
who, in his own way also, is deeply desirous— 
perhaps even more so than either philosopher 
or scientist — to ask in widest wisdom the 
question, What is Truth? and who will 

2 



18 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

accept only such approaches to answer as 
make for simplification. I refer to the 
poet. 

I might engage much of your time — and 
not unprofitably, I think — in proving to you 
the importance — indeed, the necessity — of 
your understanding the true place of the poet 
in our education, whether as individuals or 
race. For his methods of expressing thought 
are the methods of every man, woman, and 
child ; of every race, cultured or aboriginal ; 
of pope or penitent, prince or pauper. All 
language is based upon the system of meta- 
phorical expression. Our growth in mind 
is but increasing victory in expression. Our 
language, whether in its proverbs, its idioms, 
or its words, is a system of representing 
abstract ideas in concrete metaphor. This 
is Nature's law of speech and thought : the 
poets have made language. Upon some 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 19 

other occasion I may have the privilege of 
showing you that humbler creatures than 
ourselves, from whom we descend and inherit 
all the potentialities of life, present and to 
come, also have obeyed a law of symbolic 
expression. Nothing grows save in virtue 
of the principles of its beginning. You 
will see, if you give this a little thought, 
that I am stretching no point in thus 
extolling the position of the poet. He 
teaches us expression ; and without the 
means of expression, I take it, there is 
little means of learning. 

I claim that the use of metaphor is 
the natural way of teaching and learning ; 
consequently, although I am now essaying 
to instruct you in matters of science, which 
has no dealings save with fact, and in 
matters of philosophy, wherein we must 
be wary lest the symbol be mistaken for 



20 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

the life itself, or the material for the vital 
power that materializes, — consequently, I 
say, I shall make frequent use of my natural 
right : I shall use metaphor, and even fable, 
if need be, so long as I am careful that 
neither I nor you mistake illustration of 
an idea for evidence of fact, nor similar- 
ity of appearance for analogy of nature. 
Indeed, I maintain that Shakespeare 
succeeds in educating us where Kant, for 
instance, fails. I hold that Burns has seen 
deeper into some laws of Nature than Plato. 
I believe that the poet, like the child, often 
feels, and hence in some measure under- 
stands, that uniformity of Nature in sim- 
plicity of law which is withheld alike from 
the experience and intelligence of the philo- 
sopher. And why? Simply because poet 
and child, being simple offspring of Nature, 
use her own method of expression, and learn 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 21 

something of wisdom in spite of the lack 
of scientific precision in their observations 
and of logic in their deductions. 

The scientific man considers himself the 
antithesis of the irrational poet, and thinks 
that the poetical method is inconsistent with 
the purpose of science. The poet, on the 
other hand, often holds the scientist in fear 
because he misunderstands the need of crude 
fact. What I would impress upon you is 
this, that the poetical method can never be 
unscientific, for it is itself a natural law. 
If language is a natural development, poetry 
is the outcome of Law ; and that savant 
who maintained that any one of Nature's 
processes was irrational would surely be 
proclaimed as unscientific or demented ! 
Fancy a Darwin questioning the reason- 
ableness of the law of evolution ! or an 
astronomer who would dare reconstruct the 



22 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

planetary system on a better basis ! And 
no more than these can the philosopher 
discard the ingenuities of language when it 
seeks to represent abstract thought in terms 
of metaphor. Perhaps if the philosophers 
had used more fully the language of daily 
life, they would have succeeded better, and 
have illuminated what they often set down 
in shadow ; they would have done for thought 
what Shakespeare has done for sympathy, 
and made the understanding of wisdom the 
birthright of every man. And now let me 
proceed. 

(ii). The more surely science leads us to 
the simplification of facts, the more surely 
we become impressed by the uniformity of 
Law. To make this apparent to those un- 
versed in natural science would occupy more 
time than is at our disposal, and I must 
beg these to take my words on trust. What 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 23 

I would have everyone realize, scientific or 
unlearned, is the fact, which, I say, the simple 
child appears to realize, of the brotherhood 
of all life in its essential conditions. It is 
this fact that the biologist has been so intent 
upon demonstrating all through the past 
century ; it is a fact which every new dis- 
covery in the buried histories of past geo- 
logical ages emphasizes ever more strongly. 
Briefly we may state that all life has evolved 
from lowly beginnings to increasingly high 
on-goings, and that the brotherhood of life 
is such in virtue of a parentage in the in- 
effable unknown, however humble or exalted 
the myriad species may be in the great 
animal or vegetable kingdoms. 

Though there be multitudinous variations 
and modifications in these laws, as they adapt 
themselves to changing environment and 
increase of purpose, the fundamental laws 



24 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

remain unchanged. If we please, we may 
define Life as the manifestation of its idea 
in fact by the constant in-taking for use, and 
casting out when done with, of matter, during 
which process physical laws are let loose or 
controlled. In such definition we say what is 
true of every form of life. All the laws of 
physiology, the laws of birth and work, of 
generation and death, are summed up in 
this definition, and apply to all the subjects 
of both animal and vegetable kingdoms. 
We are all offspring of one parent, and share 
in a common heritage. 

The old Law of Heraclitus, that nothing 
lives but in virtue of its becoming other- 
wise in growth and change, is absolutely 
substantiated as the great law of Nature ; 
and in the realms; of metaphysics it has 
a significance deeper than we can fathom. 
We must grow or decay, live or die. And 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 25 

the corollary of this law is that nothing 
exists but in virtue of that which has gone 
before and brought it. All we possess is 
in virtue of inheritance. All that we do 
is in virtue of the possibility in us for 
doing, which possibility we inherit from 
our ancestry. And our ancestry, although 
incapable of carrying into effect many of 
the possibilities lying dormant within it, yet 
was able — nay, was impelled — to hand on 
a possibility of wider growth : a potentiality 
that could not be realized until the individual 
inheritors and transmitters of the Law had 
grown capable of revealing it. And this 
Law rules that the race must ultimately 
fulfil its destiny. 

This statement, I think you will find, 
contains the gist of the theory of heredity, 
though it is dogmatic and expressed in terms 
of teleology. I want you to grasp the idea 



26 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

for all it is worth, as it holds in it much of 
that simplification which I seek. As the 
oak has evolved from the acorn because of 
the dormant possibilities lying in the germ, 
and although such possibilities exist only in 
idea or function and not in actual structure ; 
and as that germ is valueless, in spite of 
its buried miracle, without the ministration 
of suitable soil, rain, sun, and wind ; so have 
we exalted animals been evolved from some 
mighty primordial germ virile in virtue of 
a possible destiny. Nothing we achieve, 
nothing we feel, nothing we know, but the 
possibility of its ultimate fructification lay 
hid or partly revealed in the patient, half- 
sleeping hearts of our countless ancestry. 
And this is what I mean by the uniformity 
of life, by the simplicity of the vital law. 

Is, then, such simplicity too vast in its 
embrace for our acceptance? Not to the 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 27 

true scientist : for he is ever confronted with 
the great fact that the primordial germ 
contained in it all the possibilities of the 
myriad changes that led upwards to man's 
creation. To the true scientist, I say, it 
cannot be too vast, even though he, knowing 
how we possess nothing save in virtue of 
our inheritance, is compelled to ask, in spite 
of his cherished agnosticism, the question of 
questions, Whence this primordial inherit- 
ance? Of those among you who are 
students of science I would beg that you 
would carry about with you this question, 
and not cast it from you because you can 
find to it no answer in fact. Of those of 
you whose chosen work in the world is to 
study the nature of the divine, and teach 
your suffering fellows how to draw from 
the infinite wells of life that which will 
quench their thirst, I would beg that you 



28 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

look into the revelations of Nature, no less 
than into the revelations of Scripture, and 
find that there is no antagonism in Truth. 
In the simplification of Law lies the en- 
couragement of Faith. 

Nothing in us men, I say, exists save in 
virtue of our inheritance. We hold from 
our parentage high estates that we must ever 
enlarge. We hold, as certainly, debts, and 
with them, thank God ! an obligation to 
liquidate them. Our power of love, our 
freedom of will, our selfishness, our cruelties, 
our enthralment to the demands of that very 
law of life in whose service we are en- 
listed — all are ours, for good or evil, in virtue 
of our inheritance. 

How, then, will you biologists exclaim, 
shall we find love and freedom of will in 
an amoeba, a sponge, a coral ; in fish, reptiles, 
birds and beasts of the field? Yes, I say, 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 29 

we should so find them could we analyze 
the vis vitce which is mighty even in these 
in virtue of the hidden potential power : yes, 
I say, when, given the germ of the acorn, 
we can analyze and discover in it the 
necessity of producing the oak-tree. For if 
you biologists repudiate the suggestion that 
the highest human passions and virtues lay 
dormant in our ancestry, if you cannot 
admit that here and there upon the vast 
ladder of ascent our own excellences and 
depravities may be dimly indicated in our 
humble progenitors, then you must allow 
the only alternative : that man, in his 
essential being, differs from his parentage. 
But in such claim you advocate the theory 
of special creation — a term which is rightly 
repugnant to the evolutionist, seeing that 
all the wealth of his labour denies any 
process of creation except that of growth. 



3Q THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

All is Law, inexorable, definite, unchanging 
Law ; and the law of life is inheritance, 
whether it manifest itself as love or free-will, 
as growth in obedience or blossoming in 
freedom. And we students, humbly wor- 
shipping at the shrine of Truth, must accept 
all the words that fall from her mouth, 
whether they condemn our little systems and 
theories, or whether they inspire us with new 
life to pursue our journey and understand her 
behests. Our purpose in study is to obey 
and understand, to love truth rather than 
any specious mockery of comprehension. 

You will, by this time, not be surprised 
if I affirm that the religious sense is no 
new acquirement, but has been dormant 
throughout our evolution, and is awakened 
to a very passion in the life of some saints. 
But I shall do more than this : I shall, 
I trust, convince you that we have actual 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 31 

evidence of the presence of the religious 
idea, in many manifestations, throughout 
the world of life. For my purpose is to 
show you that, as structure and function 
augment in the evolving forms of life, so 
do they give us increasing evidence of the 
relation of each individual to the eternal 
law of which it is a manifestation. Each 
and all, humble or exalted, serve, in varying 
degree of simplicity and success, the Idea, 
or the Law, in virtue of which they exist, 
although in the same service they must 
pursue their individual duties. But this 
declaration of my purpose does not quite 
comprise what we signify by the religious 
sense. And I must be more definite, al- 
though it will scarcely be possible for you 
to grasp the full significance of a definition 
until the argument is completed. 

I take it that every mental and emotional 



32 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

attribute may exist in a passive and active 
state. Whether it be one or the other de- 
pends upon the degree of consciousness and 
freedom of action of the individual. In the 
transition of the passive to the active is 
found the evolution or growth of such attri- 
bute. Let me be more explicit. Memory is 
more finely developed in some of the lower 
animals than in man, and many of the 
weakest intellects among ourselves possess 
phenomenally fine memories. But in the 
less highly developed minds the faculty of 
memory is purely passive or mechanical or 
involuntary: a page of histoiy, for instance, 
is read to a feeble-minded child, who after- 
wards will repeat it accurately, but will not 
be able to answer a single question concerning 
its matter. Memory partakes of the active 
quality only when it is wedded to intellect 
by the high-priest of our will. 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 33 

So with our reasoning faculty. The insects 
evince a form of intelligence that has so much 
the appearance of mind that their students 
and lovers declare them to be second only 
in reasoning power to human beings. But 
their brain-work is mechanical, passive, in- 
voluntary ; their actions are impelled by 
circumstances from whose compulsion there 
is no appeal. There is no evidence of 
choice or will-power. Of this I shall speak 
at greater length in my third lecture. 

Again, the emotion of love in almost 
all its aspects is met with in the 
humbler grades of life-evolution, and I 
suspect that, if we knew all, we should 
find no form of life without some measure 
of this attribute, which philosophers have 
ever associated so intimately with life 
and creative power. But in the humbler 
forms of life, whether human or standing 

3 



34 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

lower, love is also purely passive, and under 
the compulsion of a law that is not perceived 
or understood ; while in the finer specimens 
of men and women, perhaps in most of 
them, love rises into an active personal 
equivalent, in which its possessors con- 
sciously, voluntarily, take part in the 
furtherance of the law by which they 
are, even if unconsciously, encouraged or 
impelled. 

In all such faculties or properties the 
difference between man and his progenitors 
lies in his consciousness of the forces within 
him, in his power of studying them and 
understanding their origin and import, and 
even more in his power of choosing which 
of his inherited instincts — the lower or the 
higher — he will co-operate with. 

It is my purpose, I say, to show that the 
religious sense prevails throughout creation, 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 35 

although it varies extraordinarily, not only 
in the multitude of species but in man also, 
in its clearness of manifestation. I want 
to insist upon the point that this sense of 
religion has evolved by slow processes of 
gradation, as all other animal attributes, 
whether structural or functional, have evolved. 
I want to show that the religious sense, no 
less than our bones, has evolved from pre- 
historic beginnings, just as our power of 
will and our faculty of renouncing rights 
and desires are but the blossoming, if 
not yet the fructification, of forces that 
have lain dormant in the living acorn of 
time. 

(iii). And now for our definition. The re- 
ligious sense, whether passive or active, is that 
acknowledgment of the Law which compels 
all creatures possessing the sense to work 
or live for objects or attainments, be they 



36 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

immediate or prospective, in which the 
individual has no personal concern, save 
perhaps in exalted specimens of the species 
Man. I would beg you to note this defini- 
tion, for unless we hold its essential points 
we shall often be at variance and shall need 
to reiterate its claims. The definition insists 
that this sense, which I call religious, plays 
a great, if not the chief, part in the evolution 
of life, and is fundamental in the develop- 
ment of man's obligation to live in con- 
formity with the Law and in the winning of 
his freedom. 

You will perceive that I have deliber- 
ately excluded from this definition any 
suggestion of the religious sense being 
identical with the social sense. This latter 
is quite as real and nigh as powerful as the 
former ; nor is it easy to understand where 
lies the line of demarcation between them. 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 37 

Nevertheless, the social sense operates mainly, 
if not solely, in the materjal interest of the 
individuals, even if collectively ; while the 
religious sense recognizes the relation of life 
to the unknown Law which would appear 
to embrace purposes, perhaps immediate, 
perhaps only prospective, of which its 
slaves see nothing and imagine but a little. 
Although the social sense may prove a 
stepping-stone, or phase, in the evolution of 
the religious sense, it is not the same thing : 
for the social sense is utilitarian, the religious 
is ideal ; the social is altruistic, the religious is 
transcendental. The social is scientific — i.e. 
deals in measurable and cognizable facts ; the 
religious is intangible. The religious deals 
with old, yet ever abiding, philosophic wisdom 
rather than with the new knowledge which 
we find so necessary in our ephemeral 
labours. 



38 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

A psychologist may, if he please, define the 
religious sense as a refined outcome of the social 
law that proclaims charity to be meritorious 
only in proportion to the advantage accruing 
to society. If this psychologist can justify 
his attempt to belittle our untutored sense of 
the ideal, I am silenced. Yet to me the 
Law which inspires this sense must be greater 
than man whom it has produced ; and I fail 
to see that we come any nearer its under- 
standing by attempts to prove it less than 
the ideal of its creature. Both social and 
religious senses indeed partake of the ethical ; 
but notwithstanding this common holding 
of the two, the one, I say, is of self 
because limited by utilitarian guarantees, 
while the other is of the eternal Law. And 
the eternal Law is known and measured 
in the passion which some few evince to 
serve it even at the cost of all that 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 39 

makes life worth having in a mundane 
sense. 

Although I maintain that the social and re- 
ligious senses are not identical, I believe that 
they both manifest themselves through the 
operation of the same principle in life, which 
impels the individual on the one hand to good 
citizenship, and on the other to a prophet's 
or martyr's death. That they are not the 
same St. Paul was careful to teach ; that 
they are not the same our science shall show 
us. They are no more the same than the 
budding, blossoming, and fructification of 
the vine are the same, though each such 
aspect of life stands in virtue of the same 
impelling growth. And my purpose is to 
show you that, in studying the simpler 
manifestations of a law, we may arrive at 
a truer understanding of its fuller develop- 
ments. Therefore, although I again affirm 



40 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

that the social sense is not identical with — 
nay, that in some respects it may appear 
inimical to — the religious sense, yet the under- 
standing of the one will, by natural process, 
lead to an understanding of the other. 
Unless, once more, we admit special creation, 
we must know that all life lives by growing, 
and that, the greater the wonder of its com- 
plexity, the stronger must the evidence 
become that even man lives only in evolution. 

(iv). I must now give you a brief suggestion 
as to the headings of my subject, for I think 
it will help you to understand the simpler 
arguments if, at the very beginning, you 
have some hint of the method of thought 
by which they will lead you. 

In this my first lecture I am going to tell 
you the story of a very simple form of life — 
that of the sponge. In it I shall show you 
a city built by living things, each of which, 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 41 

while building the wonderful structure and 
sustaining its own needs, shares the life of 
its neighbours, whether near or distant. I 
shall further show how each individual is 
inspired by the desire to attain that upon 
which the community is intent, although 
immediately and personally unconcerned in 
its fulfilment. Thus shall I argue that the 
earliest indications of a germinal religion 
in service are revealed to us. 

In my second lecture I shall show you 
where we may find early evidence of 
religion in renunciation. It is manifested 
alike in the humblest of animal forms and 
the most perfect of flowers, and in its 
expression of truth it shines in beauty. I 
shall seek to make clear to you how life is 
gifted not only with a purpose beyond the 
understanding of its servants, but is intent 
upon the manifestation, in outward and 



42 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

visible sign, of the truth of its inspiration 
to live in accord with transcendental idea. 

In my third lecture I shall advance more 
evidence for allowing the religious sense 
to rank as a psychical fact in man, and 
that as clearly 'distinguished from the instinct 
of social obligation. We shall make enquiry 
into the relation of the religious sense to 
social claims. We shall, in studying insect 
communities, realize how their perfect sub- 
servience to their laws is accounted for by 
an automatic and restricted religious sense 
closely akin to social law. I shall show, 
further, how, in man's emancipation from 
the chains that, like the laws of the bees, 
bound his forgotten ancestry to a passive 
obedience necessarily precluding the pos- 
sibility of sin, he has attained freedom 
and power ; and how at the same time, 
and as a condition of his freedom, he has 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 43 

acquired the faculty of working in opposition 
to the law of his being. 

(v). Now I am going to be very elementary 
in my description of the humblest forms 
of life, because I would have you under- 
stand that their vitality, no less than the 
vitality of the most complex forms, depends 
upon the idea in which they exist rather 
than upon their structure and form. This 
sounds ominously like plunging into a 
philosophic abstraction at the very moment 
I am offering you simple concrete facts ; 
but a few of these facts will show you at 
once that even their simplicity involves a 
philosophic explanation. And if we realize 
how idea rules form, builds and vivifies 
structure, we shall the more easily under- 
stand that power over us and all life 
which our religious sense of transcendental 
obligation proclaims. 



44 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

You have all heard or read of, and some 
of you have been very near handling and 
directly studying, that particle of elemental 
protoplasm which is called an amceba. This 
is, in idea and in fact, almost the simplest 
conceivable manifestation of life. It is an 
elemental cell in which we can define the 
difference between life and lifeless matter, yet 
in words that shall embrace all creation. The 
properties of matter you know, as distin- 
guished from life, are best expressed in terms 
of their physical attributes, such as gravity, 
electricity, light, heat, etc. None of these 
forces can escape the law of their interchange 
in mathematically measurable equivalents ; 
none can be destroyed or created, and no 
matter can escape their domination. 

On the other hand, the essential of 
protoplasmic life appears to be a power of 
holding in check the physical forces that 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 45 

destroy it as soon as its life departs and 
leaves it mere matter. And herein we may 
say lies the secret of life : it has power 
over all those forces and elements that we 
can measure in our laboratories and define 
in our text-books with absolute precision. 
More than this, as every biologist must 
admit, each individual element, whether 
simple as an amoeba or complex as a man, 
is not only holding in check chemical 
forces that will destroy such element as 
soon as its vitality wanes or departs, but it 
is actually at warfare with other forms of 
life that can destroy it no less surely than 
physical forces. And when either amoeba 
or man dies, the material forms which each 
had built, inhabited and controlled are 
assailed by myriad life-forms, be they 
bacteria or worms, which prey upon the 
abandoned garments of life. 



46 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

The essential conditions of life, then, being 
strife with physical forces and opposing life- 
forms, we find that any item of life excels 
so long as its purpose is fulfilled in the 
work it does. And growth is the outcome 
of such work and warfare. Moreover, in an 
individual's recognition, passive or active, of 
the Law's hidden purpose lies the religious 
sense. In the failure to obey this triune 
law of warfare, work, and growth, whether 
we study the moral nature of man or the 
lowest forms of life or the intermediate 
means of man's evolution, we observe the 
overcoming of the higher by the lower. It 
is the law of Nature that he who will not 
work must rot ; that he who will not strive 
will be enslaved ; that he who will not 
seek increase shall impersonate the horror 
of degeneration. 

But to return to the amceba : it consists 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 47 

solely in a particle — the size is of no 
importance — of protoplasm. It has no dis- 
coverable structure, no organs, no senses. 
Its shape is always changing, and in its 
changes it effects movement, whether for 
progression in the water it inhabits or for 
seizing morsels of food. From any point 
of its changing surface it can thrust forth 
a couple of lips to catch a floating particle. 
The lips close and form a temporary mouth. 
This mouth next becomes a stomach that 
so operates upon the food that it separates 
what it needs from what it does not. It 
digests the former and discards the latter 
from any point on its surface. And you 
will perceive from this description that the 
amoeba's needs adapt its form for their 
fulfilment : its functions are not dependent 
upon special structures, as is mostly the 
case with more highly organised creatures. 



48 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

But, besides this amoeba, there are 
multitudes of different kinds of simple par- 
ticles of protoplasm each having different 
needs, according to the different work each 
one is predestined to perform ; and it is by 
the work done, and not by the structure, 
that we know and classify some of them. 
Each, moreover, reproduces its kind with 
its own functions, and never with the 
functions of another kind, although in 
appearance, chemical composition, and 
mode of life the two kinds may appear 
identical. And herein we find the essential 
element in these lowly forms of life as 
well as in the mighty of the earth : each 
item of life is what it is in virtue of its 
function, although to declare this truth is 
to declare that life is what it is in virtue 
of an abstract idea to which it owes its 
existence. 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 49 

I am deeply anxious that you should 
understand the importance of this function , 
upon which depends, I say, the nature and 
work of any living object, rather than upon 
the structure produced by it for the sake of 
fulfilling such function ; therefore I will give 
you further illustration of what I mean. We 
might examine the roots of, say, a growing 
spike of wheat and a bean-shoot in the same 
soil. Each rootlet is terminated by living 
protoplasmic cells, structureless and identical, 
that of the bean with that of the wheat. Yet 
each differs in this extraordinary although 
obviously essential fact : that the minute 
servant-cells of the wheat select from the soil 
flint for the strengthening of the straw, while 
the bean's gleaners of its food reject the flint 
as unnecessary. And I maintain that these 
particles of protoplasm are virile in their 
function in virtue of the ideal needs of the 

4 



50 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

plant which they serve, and which has pro- 
duced them : they are what they are, not in 
virtue of their composition, but in virtue of 
the work they are able to do — that is, in 
virtue of the idea in which they are thrust 
forth into the soil to seek food for their 
masters. 

And in like manner do all particles of 
protoplasm, whether they live alone or in 
communities, labour variously, not in virtue 
of their structure, but because of their 
parental inheritance of an idea in purpose, 
of a function in attainment Look at the 
Foraminifera — those multitudinous shell- 
forms encasing microscopical particles of 
structureless protoplasm that compose the 
deep Atlantic mud, and have built up the 
chalk cliffs and limestones — each and all have 
definite work, and are true to their inherit- 
ance of the idea or form of shell they must 



Plate I. 




a, amphistegina Lesscni ; b, cornuspira foliacea ; c, lagena vulgaris ; 
d, rotaliaBeccarii ; e, lagena sulcata ; /, Discorbina. c and /'represent 
live specimens with their pseudopodia projecting— in the latter from 
the minute orifices with which the shell is perforated, in the former 
from a large opening 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 51 

produce. The function of each is to extract 
the carbonate of lime dissolved in the 
sea, and excrete it as a chalky covering 
identical in shape to that of its parents. 
We have here a diagram (Plate I.) showing 
some of these pretty forms, which are 
among the commonest and most beautiful 
of the microscope's objects. You will note 
that the form of some, e.g., the discorbzna, is 
identical with that of the nautilus (Plate VI.) 
or an ammonite, which rank as far above the 
Foraminifera as man ranks above these ex- 
quisite molluscs. Many of them have minute 
pores, through which their possessors thrust 
attenuated and extemporised portions of their 
bodies to seize upon and absorb the food they 
need. Others keep open one end of their 
encasing armour for the same purpose ; and 
although their little bodies are all the same 
inside, and they all labour in making an 



52 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

armour of the same chemical composition, 
yet they inherit, as part of this function 
or idea of work, a function and idea of 
form. 

Now I am going to say more about this 
diversity of work as we may observe it in 
other structureless particles of protoplasm, 
which labour together in furtherance of one 
ultimate object. They live in communities 
and work in co-operation, but specialize the 
various kinds of labour necessary for the 
erection of a very wonderful and ordinary 
structure — the sponge. 

And in this, as in every study of life, we 
take a simple form. Only in understanding 
the simple can we hope to grasp the 
significance of the complex : only thus 
can we hope to grasp the relation of the 
abstract idea or principle to its concrete 
manifestation. 



'late II. 












A, Spongilla fluviatilis, enlarged, showing crater-like apertures. 

a, the same, natural size. B. Diagram (after Huxley) of the spongilla's 
waterways and ciliated chambers. a, a, openings in outer wall; 

b, moat ; c, chambers lined with ciliated cells ; d, egress from the 
chambei-s ; e, outgoing canals leading into /, the crater-like orifice 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 53 

(vi). The simplest form of the sponge for 
our present study is a fresh-water specimen 
known as Spongilla fluviatilis (Plate II.). It 
is animal, and not vegetable as was formerly 
supposed. It is found in green masses on the 
walls and banks of docks, canals, rivers, or 
on long-immersed twigs and floating timber. 
It has, like most though not all sponges, a 
skeleton formed partly of horny substance 
and partly of flinty needles. It is the skeleton 
of sponges remaining after the community 
is dead, by which we know its species. In 
different kinds the forms of skeleton are won- 
derfully unlike one another ; but the mode 
of life varies little in spite of difference in 
destiny and parentage. For one instance, we 
have the common domestic sponge — a dead 
city built by the living, its walls and portals 
formed of an elastic substance of wonderful 
tenacity and softness. Another is a specimen 



54 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

called Venus's flower-basket or Euplectella 
(Plate III.), while a third, very different again, 
is known as Glass-rope. Most of the sponges 
are fixed as soon as their childhood is past ; 
and some {clionce), attaching themselves to 
the shells of molluscs, bore holes through 
the walls of their unwilling hosts. But, 
whatever their form or mode of life, each 
kind of sponge is a colony of innumerable 
individuals working together towards a 
common object, in which they are uncon- 
sciously concerned : not all doing the same 
work, but specializing in mutual service in 
order that the purpose in the life of each 
and all may be the better attained. 

The spongilla, then, consists of skeleton 
and a live substance which may be spoken 
of as the sponge-flesh. It is this that we 
must study. It consists of multitudinous 
cells, each of which possesses a certain 



Plate III. 




(Enplcctella 
aspergillum) 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 55 

amount of individuality, although sharing 
with its myriad brethren in a common 
purpose. We have here (Plate II.) a 
diagram of the city built by these little 
bodies, which we will call briefly the sponge- 
sarcodes. We find an outside wall com- 
posed of these living creatures, each of which 
is indistinguishable, in simplicity of function 
and absence of structure, from an amoeba. 
They are arranged in close order and contact, 
each spending its life in building, strengthen- 
ing and enlarging the solid substance upon 
which it sits ; and, curious as it must seem 
to us whose great desire in our work is to 
be quit of it, the masonry and its masons 
never part during life. In this outer wall 
or bulwark are many openings, which, in 
some kinds of sponge without skeletons, open 
and close as need requires. These openings 
lead into a great moat surrounding the 



56 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

citadel. To the moat finds access, through 
the gates in the outer wall, the water in 
which are carried the food and building- 
supplies necessary to the city's work. How- 
ever great may be the rush of water outside, 
within this great moat or harbour all is 
comparatively still. The particles of food — 
or trading vessels, shall I call them ? — are 
gently carried into the deep waterways of 
the interior. But how are they carried 
inwards? In the ramparts of the citadel 
itself, which form the inner confines of the 
moat, are likewise many openings, through 
which currents of water, with the building 
material they carry, are kept moving, so 
that all the deep streets and alleys, caverns 
and cellars, have their share of good things. 
All the walls are crowded with these living 
sarcodes, within and without. And here 
and there, especially in the passages leading 



; THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 57 

directly inwards from the moat, are found 
little chambers, through which each ingoing 
stream passes. These I would have you 
particularly note : they are lined also with 
the sponge-sarcodes, though here these differ 
from the mason-cells in one respect. Each 
has thrust from its free surface a long 
lash or cilia, as it is called, which sweeps 
the water always in one direction. Thus, 
together with its fellows, it forms a broom- 
like lining to the chamber, each bristle being 
alive and intent upon its special duty of 
sweeping inwards, in co-operation with its 
neighbours, supplies to the workers within. 
Thus rivers are kept flowing inwards from 
the still harbour, bearing in their waters 
the food. 

And the sweeping members of the com- 
munity take from the water all they need, 
and pass it onwards, still rich in supply, 



58 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

to their mates, busy upon other tasks 
within. 

In the depths of the sponge the little 
streams of water give up what the sponge 
needs, and take in exchange manufactures 
that, though refuse from the sponge's point 
of view, are highly prized by all the indi- 
viduals and cities of the vegetable kingdom. 
These products are carbonic acid and 
nitrogen compounds similar to those we use 
in our gardens as manure ; and without 
these by-products of the animal, as you 
know, the vegetables could not live, just as, 
unless these last threw off the oxygen from 
the carbonic acid which they seize upon 
for its carbon, the animals would die. And 
from the sponge's deep recesses and streets 
the little streams are gathered together again 
into one large channel, which ultimately, like 
a great covered canal, carries the waters 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 59 

through the outer ramparts, moat, and bul- 
warks into the flowing water of the unknown 
river. 

And this is the plan upon which all 
sponge-cities work, however varied the style 
of architecture, or however different the 
materials used. In all of them the citizens 
are living and intent upon their particular 
duties. Some supply the food, some build ; 
and others rest while awaiting their time 
of service to the law in its needs of their 
offspring. And the builders labour differently 
according to the needs of the whole city. 
Thus some in the spongilla manufacture 
horny stuff; and some make the flinty needles 
where stronger support is needed. In the 
common sponge no flinty or chalky skeleton 
is made except at the points where its 
attachment needs greater strength of frame. 
Then the architecture varies more with the 



60 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

sponge's parentage than does that of us 
men with our social class. Some of us live 
in palaces, some in pigstyes ; yet we are all 
men, and capable of living in either, though 
we judge one another by the mere accident 
of social rank. But in the sponge-sarcode 
there is no interchange of style or rank, 
and the spongilla could not build a Venus's 
basket. Each sponge is formed in obedience 
to the absolutely rigid law of its form : from 
which law there is no departure, although 
the law may perhaps, from time to time, 
change the demand it makes upon its 
servants. 

Now I must beg of you to note care- 
fully in your minds a very obvious fact, 
and refrain from discounting the depth of 
its significance because of its superficial 
obviousness. It is this : each of these 
sponge-sarcodes is intent upon its function. 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 61 

Indeed, all life depends upon the fact of 
its being intent, of its intending something, 
whether conscious of the fact or not. Life 
in perfection is perfection in work ; and 
work is divine so far as it thrives in obedience 
to the law of its inspiration : though its office 
is now in service of self, now in service of 
society, now in worship of a transcendental 
ideal. The little sponge-sarcode's intent is 
various. First it has its own needs to 
supply, for without doing so it could not 
fulfil its further service. Secondly, some 
show a definite function of service to their 
fellows : I refer to the sweepers. And thirdly, 
some, while feeding themselves, and serving 
themselves and their neighbours by building 
walls or firmly cementing their foundations 
to the rock, further fulfil the amazing function 
of building a city of an unconsidered yet 
determinate style ofj 'architecture, and for the 



62 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

fulfilling of an unknown purpose. Finally, 
each and all are necessary to the subsistence 
of a kingdom of which they have never 
heard, although this kingdom is also abso- 
lutely necessary to them. And each and 
all of these many functions are performed 
in obedience, unconscious and involuntary, 
to the great unknown Law. 

Now, as soon as we realize the fact 
that this obedience in service to the Law is 
accountable for the little sponge-sarcode's life 
and function, we find ourselves face to face 
with the lowliest indications of religious sense 
— the sense of obligation to obey, though the 
injunctions be those of service to others no 
less than to self ; though they enjoin recog- 
nition of some idea or law in which even the 
community is but remotely concerned, yet 
which idea or law enwraps the vast kingdoms 
of animal and vegetable in a common need 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 63 

of mutual service. Here, unless I much 
mistake you, I have given you something 
to think about ; and I do not believe, if 
you allow your imaginations free play (and 
the imagination is the mother of thought 
and knowledge), you will ever reach the 
bottom of the well from which I have set 
you drawing water. If I enabled you to 
reach a definite conclusion as to the relation 
of manifested life to the law that has pro- 
duced it, with the object of summing up 
the whole mystery in a definition, I should 
be insulting your intellects in an attempt to 
confine infinity within the bounds of finite 
definitiveness. " Le Dieu defini est le dieu 
fini," exclaimed the mystic in repudia- 
tion of dogmatic theology ; and we, rightly 
regarding every obscurity as fresh field for 
the acquisition of knowledge, shall ever 
find that each new fact we gain will give 



64 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

us further insight into the deeps of the un- 
known. Our search is for knowledge of the 
living truth : not for incrusting definitions, 
which may be helpful weapons in the war- 
fare with ignorance, but which often make 
harder the acquisition of wisdom. 

(vii). Our insight into the life of the sponge- 
city, with its countless millions of inhabitants, 
brings us to many questions that are in- 
separable from my main purpose in address- 
ing you ; and some of these I shall have 
to discuss, more especially those which 
present difficulties or which appear to oppose 
the trend of my argument. At the moment 
I shall but seek to answer one question that 
has probably arisen in your minds already, 
or that would, I trust, do so when you came 
to weigh my words hereafter. You will ask 
me whether the very basis of such an expres- 
sion as the religious sense is not an admission 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 65 

of consciousness and responsibility ; and, 
further, whether these properties are not 
inseparable from self-consciousness and in- 
dividuality. Now I am glad to think that 
you put such question to me, because it is 
absolutely just, and because there is only 
one answer to give you — namely, one of 
affirmation. But such an answer does not 
imply objection to my claim that we find 
indications of the religious sense throughout 
creation, and so definitely suggested in the 
sponge-sarcodes. Yet I must immediately 
justify this answer in some measure, though 
the argument will run through the other 
lectures ; or, if I cannot yet justify it, I will 
set you to asking the question in terms so 
much larger than you had thought neces- 
sary that you will go away with a bigger 
hope in your hearts of finding an answer 
that shall be more than a phrase or a 

5 



66 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

definition, more even than a text-book or 
a creed. 

You may think that I am assuming too 
much in suggesting individuality to these 
sponge-sarcodes — that practically I am at- 
tributing to them consciousness and what 
we may call, for lack of more definite 
words, the possession of a soul ; and I admit 
the claim, if you will remember that I do 
not believe in special creation, and that I 
do believe that the evolution of mighty 
things from small beginnings has come 
about precisely in virtue of the possibility, 
dormant yet germinal within them, to do so. 
This is a big conception ; and we cannot 
get away from its reality, whatever our line 
of study or bent of mind. Be we scientists 
or theologians, materialists or idealists, this 
heroic fact — of evolution in virtue of pro- 
spective possibility — remains. And all of 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 67 

us must ask, Whence this possibility? 
Whence the original germ of our evolution ? 
Each of us must admit that the answer is 
hid from us in the mystery of the unknown 
Law. Some will be content to ask no further, 
will be content to admit that we cannot tell, 
will be content to sleep again and call our 
sleep the philosophic enjoyment of life. But 
others, I think, will live their lives passion- 
ately discontent with any semblance of in- 
tellectual ease, and will pursue the question 
of questions from point to point, knowing 
that science alone will not serve — that true 
living and pure thoughts, the trust of ideals 
and the relinquishment of self-service, can 
alone bring us nearer to that wisdom and 
peace which lie beyond all knowledge and 
science and philosophy. All thought, like 
all great deeds in the world's history, 
has arisen from discontent with present 



68 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

limitations — from a passion to further the 
spirit of growth in betterment. This spirit is 
the birthright of every man, woman, and child, 
because it is the essential condition of that 
life which has ever been evolving towards 
some unknown destiny in obedience to its 
parental law. 

Even the religious sense, even man's soul 
itself, has been evolved from primordial 
beginnings : and the virtue of the tree is 
the same as the virtue of the budding 
cotyledons. If we can more simply know 
what life means by studying the first signs 
of life in the germinating seed, we may 
likewise learn something of the nature of 
the religious sense and the soul possess- 
ing it by watching it as it buds in the 
sponge. 

Such as will now accuse me of anthropo- 
morphism in finding the rudiments of ethical 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 69 

law in a sponge, I will pray to offer me 
other means of investigation than the an- 
thropomorphic. We can judge of the nature 
of God only by the human intellect's judg- 
ment of the nature of man and belief in 
what he might be : we can judge of the 
nature of a sponge-sarcode only by our 
knowledge of life in ourselves, and by 
perception of the fact that life is the same 
in its essential attributes throughout all 
creation. The only differences are those of 
degree. Indeed, recent scientific work all 
tends to justify this anthropomorphism. 
Weissmann's investigation of the laws of 
genesis and death are studied in the very 
humblest forms of life ; while the researches 
of Galton on the inheritance of genius have 
found their scientific exposition in the 
experiments of Mendel in the production 
of variation in peas. Moreover, the converse 



70 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

is equally true. Buffon argued that " to 
understand what had taken place in the 
past, or what will happen in the future, 
we have but to observe what is going on 
in the present." This dictum, upon which 
modern geology is based, is in all proba- 
bility an equally true guide to the laws that 
have necessitated our life in its evolution. 

In the study of life, as appears to me, 
we must either be anthropomorphic or fall 
back upon the first chapter of Genesis as 
a relation of scientific facts. To find the 
same laws of heredity and variation in the 
races of peas and the races of men ; to 
find the same laws of feeding, working, 
resting ; the same laws of parentage and 
bringing forth ; the same laws of desiring 
life for unknown purposes — of compulsory 
dying in the midst of good things we seem 
to understand ; — to find these same laws, I 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 71 

say, throughout all life should bid us pause 
before we scoff at finding that the intent of 
service to fellow and obedience to unknown 
law in the sponges is germinal of the social 
and religious sense in man. Our life in its 
mortality may truly be but an adumbration 
of that full shining of the eternal life which, 
because we possess a measure of it, we are 
able to imagine in its beauty : yet is this 
our shadowed life brilliant in contrast with 
the lightless life of the citizens of the 
sponge. Correspondingly, seeing that our 
own religious sense is accounted for only by 
an instinctive belief in a possible perfection, 
the reality of which is not weakened by 
the fact that few or no men have attained 
it, I see no reason why we should deny 
a humble form of life, not differing in 
essence from our own, the rudiments of a 
religious sense. The fact that man has 



72 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

gained some power of guiding his life by the 
light of the Law, while the sponge-individual 
obeys solely because it cannot do otherwise, 
is no argument against the same inspiration 
being accountable for both forms of life. 

Shall we then dare to speak of the soul 
of a sponge-sarcode ? 

Yes, not only shall we dare, but, I think, 
we must so speak ; for only upon the sup- 
position that it possesses characteristics which 
we know to be essential in ourselves can 
we account for its performance of duty and 
obedience to the eternal law of its being. 
Only upon the supposition that its essential 
excellence is one with the mystic force that 
has brought ourselves into being and makes 
us labour can we have knowledge of the 
great unknown ocean : of that ocean in 
whose very bosom we lie, unconscious of 
its service to us as the spongilla of the 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 73 

river, and thinking that, because this ocean 
that upholds us is unseen, it is beyond our 
immediate and personal welfare. Only so 
can we perceive our brotherhood with a 
sponge-sarcode, and understand that, though 
our excellence of work be higher, we share 
with it the power of inheritance and 
of bequeathing, the power of doing what 
we can, the power of obeying what we 
must. 

And yet there is one great difference, 
though, I think, of degree rather than of 
kind : else we are created on a different 
plan from the great brotherhood with 
which we share the essence of life's law. 
And this difference is one which I shall 
have constant need of referring to : it is 
this — that the sponge-sarcode obeys because 
it must, and with neither understanding of 
the purpose in its life nor faculty of acting 



74 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

contrarily to the law of its being. Thus 
are virtue and vice alike excluded from 
its social and personal existence. 

On the other hand, man — though he too 
lives in virtue of an inheritance whose 
dictates he must obey, because his parents 
have ever, through the countless ages, obeyed 
them — has choice, in such directions as 
his faculties have led him to understand, of 
doing or refraining from doing, in furtherance 
of or in frustration of the essential Law 
of his and the sponge-sarcode's being. Of 
man's freedom I shall say more in my third 
lecture. 

And when this admission of the distinction 
between man's soul and the sponge-sarcode's 
is realized, we find that man is so very 
different from his little brother that he is 
inclined to claim that the very fact of his 
riches as contrasted with his brother's poverty 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 75 

implies a radical disparity. The difference 
is there, though it is one of degree rather 
than of kind. That our very will-power, 
like our anatomy and physiology, like our 
faculty of memory and power of love, has 
had beginnings so small that we cannot 
detect how or where it first became manifest, 
is no argument against the reality of its 
present strength and prospective dignity. 
No oak-tree is belittled when we realize 
that it grew to be what it is only because 
the riches of its fruitful strength lay dormant 
in the cheap acorn's heart. 

Yes, each individual sponge-sarcode has 
a soul if we have a soul ; and every bird, 
beast, and fish — nay, every loathly reptile 
and insect, every parasite, every cannibal, 
even when cultured as only the parasites and 
cannibals of our modern society can be — has 
a soul : which soul consists in its possession 



76 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

of a sense of the essential Law that has 
brought it into being. But, again, there is 
a difference. Man's soul is his own, and 
is thus personal ; and he, having attained 
self-consciousness and freedom to think and 
to do, has become accountable to the Law 
and to his fellow men for his upright living 
and growing. But the sponge-sarcode's 
little soul, full of work and obedience, is 
different from man's in this, that it is not 
its own, is not personal, is not accountable 
for its life or its works. Man's soul is in 
part his own ; the sarcode's soul is only 
God's. 

I have now given you enough to think 
about for one lecture, and I beg you to 
give the facts I have put before you some 
deep and honest labour ; for in my next 
lecture I shall have more to tell you about 
the revelations of this mighty Law in whose 



THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 77 

motherhood we live, and in the realization 
of whose right to demand our service and 
reverence we perceive the development of 
the religious sense. I shall hope that, when 
we are looking upon the religion of re- 
nunciation and the mystery of beauty, you 
will bear in mind the life-story of the sponge 
and its religion of service. For my argument 
will never go far from it. 



■ 



The Religion of Renunciation 



79 



- 



II 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 

I 
We are so habitually induced in our 

struggle with mundane matters to set aside 

our aspirations, that our minds are not at 

every moment in fit condition for the higher 

thinking. The hope and fulfilment of life 

ultimately depend upon our hunger. Yet, 

though learning is as necessary to the soul 

of man as fat is a necessity in his diet, 

neither body nor mind lie under obligation 

to grow corpulent. By no means the least 

of the barriers we erect between ourselves 

and wisdom is intellectual surfeit, or, as 

Bacon calls it, " exuberance of knowledge." 
81 6 



82 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

Overfeeding results in slackened zeal as 
surely as perennial hunger starves hope. 
Many of us are suffering from one or other 
of these disadvantages, and all weary at 
times with contending for the needful. We 
cannot at every moment find our minds and 
hearts at their best for deep thinking. 
As the things we are now dealing with 
demand, I think, the best that is in us, 
untrammelled either by surfeits of learning 
that prejudice or by a sickly starvation that 
rejects good food, we must be sure that 
we are attuned to our subject, so that no 
discords break into the order of our work. 
Consequently, before proceeding to the im- 
mediate subject of this lecture, I will recount 
the more important conclusions arrived at 
in the first. 

(i). My first lecture dealt with the obedi- 
ence of all life to a Law transcending the 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 83 

immediate needs of individuals, or families of 
individuals ; and we found, in the unconscious 
recognition of obligation to the unknown, 
some elemental suggestion of the religious 
sense. If it were objected that this sense 
cannot be considered as such because it is 
purely involuntary and unconscious, then I 
claimed that not one of our specially human 
faculties have had elemental origin. Con- 
sider for a moment an illustration of what I 
mean. The eye of a codfish is fundamentally 
the same organ as that of a great painter, 
and the sense of sight must be the same in 
both of them ; but we do not argue, because 
the fish cannot see the glories which a Turner 
transfers to his canvas, that the faculty of 
seeing is not the same in both. We do not 
say that the human eye and its mental 
equivalent could not possibly have evolved 
from similar or even simpler beginnings. 



84 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

Correspondingly, there is no reason why we 
should not study the earliest beginnings of a 
painter's power of vision, and of its intel- 
lectual counterpart, imaginative invention, in 
the simplest of fish. We may even be 
compelled to assume that an amoeba or 
sponge-sarcode must also have the elements 
of seeing in its nature, though no part of its 
body has been specially reserved for this 
function, any more than definite structure 
has been elaborated for mouth or stomach. 
Similarly, the most exalted development of 
the religious sense may have taken beginning 
in such a simplicity of obedience to natural 
law that we are unwilling to apply to it the 
word religious. 

Yet I find objections assailing me from 
two quarters. Those of you whose education 
or natural bent inclines you to accept 
scriptural revelation as the final appeal will 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 85 

quarrel with me for discovering seed-like 
beginnings of divine grace in the grass of the 
field or in the wonders of the ocean. You 
will think that I am degrading the most 
exalted of our inheritances from God to 
mere attributes which all flesh and all herbs 
acquire without consciousness or aspirational 
effort. But for my part I do not think 
we belittle the " greatest among herbs " in 
showing that it has grown from a " mustard 
seed," nor its virtues by saying that, in their 
miraculous beginning, they took form only in 
a possibility of prospective attainment. And 
I believe, if any among you do object in 
this wise, you will ultimately admit that 
the facts I am offering you have enlarged 
your conception of the divine power that 
is in every man for justifying the method 
of his creation. 

On the other hand, those among you 



86 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

whose tastes and studies lie in the pursuit 
of knowledge, and who thus incline to refuse 
all food that is other than fact, you, who 
are students of science rather than of philo- 
sophy or theology, will wonder that I, a 
man presumably of scientific education, 
should be concerned to find, ranged through- 
out the wide scale of evolution, mental 
attributes which you consider to be the mere 
outcome of social expediency, or perhaps 
as but remnants of decaying superstition. 
But you scientists, too, are easily answered ; 
for if we may not suppose that the possi- 
bilities of all human faculties, good or bad, 
intellectual or emotional, exist in the lower 
forms of life from which you say we have 
evolved, then, by this failure to admit my 
claim, you are sanctioning the heresy (to 
you as great as that of the philosopher's 
stone) of special creation. You have but two 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 87 

alternatives : if you admit special creation as 
even a part factor in the evolution of man, 
you must listen to the words of the Scriptures 
in explanation of many natural facts ; if you 
repudiate a special creation, as I, for my 
part, think you are bound to do, you will be 
compelled, before I have finished my argu- 
ment, to allow that it is not the less scientific 
that it discusses the religious sense as one 
of the mighty human attributes. 

I suspect you scientific men will readily 
admit the argument drawn from the 
similarity of a fish's and a great painter's 
eyes, because you do not question the reality 
of the human faculty of seeing. But you 
will — perhaps quite fairly — think that I am 
taking for granted too readily the religious 
sense as a definite function or attribute of 
man ; you may affirm that a major premise 
in my syllogism is at fault. I have already 



88 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

touched upon this point ; but just now, 
before we have more definite facts in hand 
— of which I have plenty to offer you — I 
shall refrain from speaking fully of this 
most important point in my argument until 
the opening of my third lecture. But 
although I may not yet have persuaded 
you that this religious sense takes vital part 
in our life, I may reiterate what I mean 
by it, and this in terms somewhat fuller 
than I have yet employed. 

The sense I speak of is religious because 
it implies a union between life in all its 
forms and the Unknown. And it is more : 
it is ethical because it implies obligation, 
whether active or passive, conscious or un- 
conscious, to the unknown origin of life's 
being. 

The sense may not be the less real that 
its possessor is unconscious of its behests. 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 89 

The sense of sight, I have just argued, is 
possessed alike by fish and man ; but the 
codfish cannot be conscious of his gift, still 
less has any knowledge of obligation towards 
it or privilege in its possession, such as are 
possessed by a Titian or a Turner. So may 
a sense, such as that of obligation to the Law, 
be strong in its influence upon a citizen of 
the sponge-city, although the little structure- 
less mass of protoplasm be utterly uncon- 
scious of its behests and impellings. As it 
is chained to the law of its being, so it obeys 
the law from an abiding sense of such obliga- 
tion. As this religious sense becomes more 
definitely manifested, so it begins to partake 
of an ethical equivalent. I have shown you 
how in the lowest forms of life the indi- 
viduals serve at once their own needs and 
the law which has need of them for purposes 
beyond their own welfare ; and in higher 



90 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

forms, long before consciousness of moral 
obligation is attained in man, we actually 
find willing, though perhaps still unconscious, 
sacrifice of personal interests and needs in 
the furtherance of the unknown Law's deep 
purposes. And in man I claim that there 
is even greater possibility of manifesting the 
Law in which all life lives, moves, and has 
its being ; and that in virtue of his conscious 
power, of his faculty of choice, he throws in 
his lot either with the Law which has given 
him freedom or with his own personal 
desires and needs which chain and im- 
prison him. 

Thus there are three standpoints in the 
evolution of obligation as vital power- 
Egoism, Altruism, Transcendentalism. We 
find ourselves first recognizing the fact that 
all forms of life live in the pursuit of their 
personal needs, although none the less in 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 91 

obedience to a law which has need of them, 
or it would not have produced them : this 
is Egoism, though expressed in terms of 
the transcendental. And we may take 
as the simplest examples of self-contained 
and self-sufficient life the beautiful Forami- 
nifera of which I told you in my former 
lecture. 

From the second standpoint we shall find 
ourselves admitting that the service of 
others is essential in all social communities 
— even when they are composed of such 
lowly individuals as the builders of the 
sponge. Here we find that Altruism (to use 
Comte's word) is as much a property of 
the humble as of the exalted, though it is 
made the basis of that philosopher's message 
of religion to those who can see no further 
than their eyes instruct them. But further, 
and still in examination of this second 



92 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

standpoint, I shall indicate in this lecture 
that actual sacrifice of personal interest is 
found throughout life, although those who 
involuntarily give up their own at the instiga- 
tion of the Law do not suffer in the process. 
This may still be no more than rigid, 
mundane altruism ; but it indubitably shares 
in the transcendental, and thereby becomes 
extra-mundane charity, as soon as it can be 
proved germinal of evolutionary fruitfulness. 

Thus we reach our third standpoint of 
Transcendentalism, whence we survey this 
same force of religious obligation in man. 
But its aspect is now changed. For man, 
having acquired some understanding of the 
Law, experiences personal obligation to suffer 
if need be, that its high behests, rather than 
his own needs and delights, be satisfied. 
Man has become, in measure great or small, 
a conscious partaker in the mighty work 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 93 

of the eternal, though its purposes are un- 
known to him ; and, in this high responsi- 
bility and conscious sharing in the building 
of the eternal city, he attains freedom, even 
though the glories of the city are hidden 
from him, because, like the sponge-sarcodes, 
he is still chained to his labour. Man, I 
repeat, is unconsciously a labourer in the 
building of the city, whose architecture and 
needs to himself he understands scarcely 
better than the sponge-sarcode grasps the 
beauty of the Venus's flower-basket ; yet 
man's city, transcendental though it must 
be to his present limited senses, may one 
day prove not less real than the city of 
the Euplectella. 

(ii). So far went the endeavour of my first 
lecture, in which I but suggested how self- 
renunciation may be essential to the further- 
ance of the Law's ideal. In this one I am 



94 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

going to show you (a) first in what manner 
this obedience to the all-embracing Law 
manifests itself in Beauty : in what manner, 
that is, all vital forms unconsciously — yes, 
still unconsciously, even in us men — recog- 
nize and declare the fact of this obedience ; 
and (J?) secondly, how definitely, not only 
service of the Law, but, more finely, renuncia- 
tion of self-service, is proclaimed as essential 
in the sense of religion. 

I must now give you the clue to the 
understanding of Beauty. It is a link 
between obedience in service and obedience 
in renunciation ; for it is the mode of 
expression common to both. 

When in my first lecture I showed you 
the deep influence of the Law upon lowly 
forms of life, I must have given you know- 
ledge that many things are very beautiful 
which you had never suspected of beauty ; 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 95 

that forms of life which " the dark, un- 
fathomed caves of ocean bear" are no less 
exquisite than our garden flowers, which 
some — perhaps the rich who hold, and not 
the meek who inherit — think were created 
for their delight, rather than to fill their own 
place in God's universe. If I then gave you 
a little thought of the universality of Beauty, 
as well as a belief in the idea of service being 
essential in life, you will be in large measure 
prepared for that which I now shall say. 
I might have discussed Beauty when we last 
met quite as appropriately as now ; and I 
might now quite fitly leave the subject till 
after my say on the religion of renunciation. 
But Beauty, as you shall presently under- 
stand, is the light of the Law ; and we shall 
best consider its nature before proceeding 
further, because Beauty, being the outshining 
of both service and renunciation, will help 



96 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

us to understand their relation to one 
another and to our life. 

Philosophers have, I take it, since ever 
they began to think, discoursed upon the 
significance of Beauty. And, again without 
giving you the views of great thinkers, I 
am going to offer you a simplification of the 
law of Beauty that shall embrace its every 
aspect ; and this although at present I intend 
going no further than an examination of the 
question in relation to the religious sense. 
And my theory is no new one : if I affirm 
Beauty to be the light of the Law, I am 
but substantiating the old saying of the 
poet that Beauty is Truth. 

You will perceive that if in my former 
lecture I dealt with the earliest indications 
of the ethical, in this I deal with the indica- 
tions of the aesthetic ; and I shall show you 
how the aesthetic is but a manifestation and 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 97 

recognition of the ethical. In other words, 
I shall make you understand that Beauty 
is the light of the Law because it is the 
revelation of the Law. Ethics is the study 
and understanding of our obligation to Law ; 
aesthetics is the expression, the outward and 
visible manifestation, of this obedience. And 
we shall find that the further obligation 
reaches in any form of life beyond its own 
personal needs, and the more definitely it 
expresses such relation to the relatively 
transcendental, the more surely do we 
instinctively declare it to partake of the 
function of beauty. Please remember this 
assertion of mine, for I think you will 
admit, before I have ended my story, that 
I have justified it. The more definitely re- 
nunciation of personal rights enters into 
the individual's life, the more surely, if such 
renunciation ranks as service to the Law, 

7 



98 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

does the individual's personality shine in 
beauty. 

To offer you, in connection with the sub- 
ject I am essaying to instruct you upon, 
a theory of Beauty must appear somewhat 
irrelevant. But it is not so ; and the further 
we proceed the more clearly will you under- 
stand that the idea of religion and that of 
beauty, if I am right in the explanation of 
its office, are inseparable from one another. 

We have many expressions in our daily 
conversation, .still more in our religious ob- 
servances, that we cannot define the meaning 
of, although they are necessary to our mutual 
understanding. So common may they be 
that we casually imagine we know all about 
them, and have no need of a philosophical 
simplification of their import. Among such 
stand prominently forth the words beauty 
and truth. Thus we often refer, without 






THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 99 

understanding precisely the significance of 
our words, to the truth of an idea, or of 
a phenomenon, or of an intent : and this 
although the person most likely to use 
such an expression is the very one to ask the 
question, " What is Truth ? " The word truth 
has to him the significance of some deeper 
origin, purpose, or law than is evident to 
the casual observer ; and in speaking of the 
truth of a matter or an idea he uses a 
phrase that declares alike his inability to 
understand and yet at the same time his 
belief in the deep origin, purpose, or law of 
that matter or idea. 

So with Beauty. The person most ready 
to feel the influence of the beautiful, and 
to recognize it as a force working benefi- 
cently in those who have eyes to see it, 
is the very one to admit that he does not 
understand it. To one whose eyes and heart 



LofC. 



ioo THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

seek truth in the ways of things, the beautiful 
awakens deep feelings that put him in some 
sort of subjective touch with a mighty, though 
hidden, intent ; and this very fact makes him 
cry out against his own dimness of eye, and 
ask the question, " What is Beauty ? " 

Moreover, if the religious sense is the 
recognition of the individual's dependence 
upon the law that has need of him and 
demands service that shall extend in purpose 
beyond the personal and social life, we may 
say that religion is the recognition of the 
deeper truths of Nature. And if some deeds 
of life proclaim its service to an idea lying 
deeper than personal needs, the manifestation 
of such idea, taking form in the embodiment 
of service, is what we mean when we speak of 
Beauty. If Truth is the deep law of our 
being, Beauty is the manifestation of such 
law. If we labour for the truth, consciously 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 101 

or unconsciously, we do so in virtue of our 
religious sense, be it conscious or uncon- 
scious. If service of the truth is pure and 
unadulterated, it produces that feeling or 
emotion in another which makes him know 
that he stands in the presence of a shining 
light which he calls Beauty. 

So that Beauty is inseparable from the 
service of the Law, and the ethical is not far 
removed from the aesthetic. When, more- 
over, we see work which is the outcome of 
service, whether observed in sponge, flower, 
or man in his highest offices, we give ex- 
pression to our feeling, ill understood though 
it may be, and say that the thing is beautiful. 

Upon some other occasion I hope I may 
have opportunity of telling you more of the 
relation of Beauty to the truth, and how, 
as man gains clearer perception of the un- 
folding Law, and desires closer touch with its 



102 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

truth, he seeks to proclaim his faith in new- 
invented forms of Beauty, and thus discovers 
Art. But for the present I must leave the 
subject, content in hoping that I have sown 
a little seed in your minds to grow and bear 
fruit. Yet there is one point which I must 
briefly refer to, because I seem to hear a 
question rising already among you. Why, 
you ask, is the beautiful not always manifest 
in those who obey the Law ? 

But is it not always so manifest? Not 
by any manner of means, you will say. 
You will look at this common sponge, and 
tell me that, if all I have said concerning 
its structure and function is true, it ought, 
according to my theory, to be as lovely as 
the Venus's flower-basket ; whereas, casually 
looking at it, you cannot admit that even 
its unquestionable service to man justifies 
us in calling it beautiful. Nevertheless, as 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 103 

soon as I have explained to you its system 
of work, and told you the truth of its law, 
and let you peep within its city walls, you 
involuntarily exclaim, forgetting your re- 
pudiation of my theory, " How beautiful ! " 
And your instinct proves truer in its feeling 
as to the essential in Beauty than your 
intellect can understand. Instinctively, when 
you see how even an ugly bath-sponge is 
the result of life intent upon its law's ful- 
filment in obedience and service, you know 
what Beauty means ; and indeed you come 
thereby a little nearer to knowing what 
Truth is. 

Moreover, as soon as this service of the 
Law becomes more obviously manifest to 
our eyes in the spinning of glassy threads 
and the weaving of them into such exquisite 
vessels as this Venus's flower-basket, we 
wonder in a less doubting spirit. " Wonder," 



104 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

says Bacon, " is the seed of knowledge," 
and our perception of Beauty's wonder 
gives knowledge of the hidden deeps. And 
further, when we know that the protoplasmic 
folk who spin, though lacking wheels, and 
weave, though wanting looms, without inter- 
communication or moving from the place 
where each is chained — when, I say, we 
understand that each lays down his micro- 
scopical length of thread in the precise 
manner needed and designed by the idea 
of the whole, formulated by the will of 
the Law governing the life of each working 
cell, we are silent in deep worship of this 
eternal, ever revealing Law, in whose service 
we men and women are also enlisted. We 
hardly then dare exclaim, " How beautiful ! " 
but fall silently on our knees as if in tacit 
prayer to the Unknown for some closer touch 
with its infinite life. 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 105 

All life above the lowest, I strongly- 
suspect, lives solely in virtue of service. 
No life truly lives save in work. If it seek 
to do otherwise, be it amceba, worm, or 
man, it dies or degenerates and becomes a 
parasite. All life is but a great brotherhood ; 
and the laws of the parental roof, though it 
be as wide as the canopy of the heavens, are 
the same for all. There is no life possible 
but in service and work ; and there is no 
good work or pure service possible save in 
the strength of an ever-growing intent. The 
life of the acorn is its power of growth ; and 
the life of man is his power of increasing 
freedom in an ever-growing capacity for 
service in renunciation. It is this faculty 
of renunciation which must now engage our 
attention. 

Once more I will show you how merit 
is not peculiar to man ; how renunciation is 



106 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

not merely the outcome of our social life 
or the invention of religious mystics and 
enthusiastic visionaries. And this time, to 
illustrate the obedience and beauty found in 
the faculty of renunciation, I pass from some 
humblest forms of animal life to some of 
the highest developments in the vegetable 
kingdom's evolution. 

I am going to tell you about two flowers — 
the daisy and the wild guelder-rose ; and, 
though perhaps some of you know more of 
their anatomy, their pedigrees, their physi- 
ology, and their place in botanical classi- 
fication than I do, I shall tell you of a 
simple fact that has been always before 
your eyes, although you perhaps have never 
perceived it. 

(iii). The daisy, although a lowly and 
common flower, takes a very exalted position 
in the evolution of the vegetable kingdom. 



Plate IV. 




THE OXEYE DAISY 



a, the complete flower-head ; b, the outer pistillate floret, with 
ligulate corolla ; c, the inner hermaphrodite floret, with tubular 
corolla; d, pistil; e, syngenesious anthers 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 107 

(Plate IV.) You probably know that it is 
a community of many individuals, each of 
which takes its share in the work of the 
city it inhabits in obedience to some in- 
stinctive, innate need : which need is the 
life of each individual floret, and co-opera- 
tively comprises the life of the whole. 
Each of the individuals forming the yellow 
disk is perfect in function and structure, 
competent to perform all the offices which 
it is the glory of flowers to perform : each, 
that is to say, contains anthers and pistil, 
pollen and ova, and spends itself in trans- 
mitting the law of life throughout the ages 
that shall come. There is no specialization 
of function or purpose among those yellow 
florets ; each lives the same life as its 
neighbour, striving in the same idea, living 
in work, and dying when its work is done. 
But the few outermost florets, those which 



108 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

shine in the aureole of white rays, are 
quite different from, though formed upon the 
same plan as, their modest fellow citizens. 
The florets of the disk, I say, are independent 
and self-contained workers in procreation, 
simply fulfilling the Law ; but the circum- 
ferential rays, — white with the purity of the 
noonday sun, tipped in the twilight red with 
which, in promise or solace, he suffuses the 
earth — these have relinquished in part their 
privileges, completeness, and independence. 
For their stamens and anthers, as you 
botanists know, have disappeared as such, 
and in their relinquishment of function have 
provided for the metamorphosis of the in- 
significant tube-like corolla into that beauti- 
ful white ray of light which extends the 
form and fairness of the flower beyond the 
bare needs of the community. But the white 
florets still retain their pistil and the function 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 109 

of producing seed, although, in consequence 
of their serving the community's needs, they 
have become dependent on other individual 
florets, through the ministrations of insects, 
for the realization of their desires or possi- 
bilities. The white petals have ordered 
their lives foolishly, according to the 
laws of political economy ; for, content 
in shining and serving, they wait upon 
ministration. 

But how do the white petals serve their 
neighbours ? In more ways than one : they 
protect them during the cold night and 
from rain in the day by folding over 
the sleeping or busy workers a tent-like 
canopy ; while when the sun shines they 
fulfil the Law's intent by attracting insects 
that shall carry the pollen from flower 
to flower, and thus favour that cross- 
fertilization which is so advantageous to 



no THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

every species in both animal and vegetable 
kingdoms. 

Now I take it that the highest physio- 
logical privilege in animal or vegetable is 
one possessed by all forms of life, that of 
fulfilling the Law's needs beyond the personal 
life of the individual, and handing onwards 
to unborn creatures the wonderful torch 
of life. Each keeps the torch burning in 
his own person, and spends his energies in 
unconsciously tending it, and all that he 
may hand it onwards to those that shall 
come, undiminished in brilliance and, if 
possible, stronger in intensity of evolutional 
purpose. Yet some individuals there appar- 
ently must be who have other offices to 
perform, and who, L though they relinquish 
this high privilege of their inheritance, who 
give up, perforce or by choice, their share 
in the increase of life that shall come, yet 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION hi 

" also serve who only stand and wait." 
Such are the white rays of the daisy. They 
stand around the homes of their breeding 
comrades, and fulfil a function which these 
have forgotten. What function? That of 
maintaining the relation with and depen- 
dence upon another kingdom of creation, 
from which they are widely separated 
in points of structure, although they stand 
related to one another in that most deep 
sympathy, mutual dependence. The insects 
of shining wing and the flowers of gay 
colours are thus mutually dependent, the 
butterflies and bees for their honey, the 
flowers for the exchange of pollen and 
the perpetuation of their species. And the 
outer florets of the daisy, unfurling their 
white flags, relinquish their individual 
perfection : they accept dependence upon 
others for fertilization solely that they may 



ii2 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

add to the perfection of the whole, and give 
to it yet another function which, without such 
renunciation, the flower had not possessed. 

What function? you again ask me. The 
function of Beauty : the function, that is, 
of declaring upon the face of its little 
citadel that the Law reigns supreme ; that 
there is truth dwelling in its inmost parts ; 
that its symmetry of form, its tender har- 
mony of colour, its strong-rayed light, all 
point to a deep law of increase in service, 
which law proclaims the inspiration of its 
intent in manifest beauty. For the law 
of all laws in growth of life is this, that 
in serving we live ; in relinquishing our 
narrower needs we grow ; in receiving from 
others what we need in exchange for service 
rendered we attain the higher freedom ; in 
fulfilling the Law our service shines in 
beauty. And note : this mutual serving is 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 113 

the very antithesis of remorseless dependence 
and irreligious charity, which both favour 
parasitism ; for I say it is the great law- 
supreme in all evolution that by losing the 
life we find it ; by giving, and thus creating 
the possibility of receiving, we extend the 
life beyond the confines of self, beyond even 
the domains of society, and win freedom 
for our growth. 1 

1 It may be objected that the increasing excellence 
of form in the outer rays of the daisy is but the result of 
the specialization of sex, which I think we may believe 
to be the first step in securing that mutual dependence 
of individuals upon one another which is the beginning 
of social evolution. But the argument will be found 
faulty if we consider individual points in some of the 
Composite. The relinquishment of the staminate 
function never appears to be of direct advantage. In 
the daisy the outer florets appear to me often to 
escape fertilization altogether, while in the leopard's- 
bane, though the outer florets do invariably become 
fertilized, their seeds, unlike those of the hermaphro- 
dites in the centre, bear no pappus, and are thus 
worse equipped for flying away from the crowded 
parental soil. Note also the fact that in the blue 
cornflower, the most beautiful of all wild composites 
in its contrast of inner and outer florets, the latter are 

8 



H4 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

Look at it with open mind, you who have 
not thought deeply upon such things, who 
have not yet dared or desired to look for 
what must lie behind Nature's facts and 
lesser laws. Do not say that I am drawing 
pretty analogies with the licence that is 
accorded to the poet just because of his 
supposed irresponsibility ! Believe me when 
I tell you of this brotherhood of all life in 
which we men and women, we daisies 



neuters. This remarkable fact should be compared 
thoughtfully with the account of the wild guelder-rose 
in the following pages. I do not think I am straining 
my argument in suspecting that beauty is the natural 
outcome of relinquishing individual interest in the 
service of the community. Nor is this relinquishment 
the less disinterested even if it be an effort after 
that specialization of sex which ultimately proves so 
necessary in evolution, and thus profitable to indi- 
viduals as well as to the species. I may add that 
there is very definite evidence in the vegetable kingdom 
of a strong tendency towards bisexualism, and that 
even among flowers that are hermaphrodite the effort 
to prevent self-fertilization and to encourage cross- 
breeding is strikingly obvious. 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 115 

and sponges, hold our being. The law of 
life is the master-law which rules us all, 
animal and vegetable, and its essential con- 
ditions are the same for all who breathe in 
action ; for all who wait in hope ; for all who 
in accepting service, serve ; for all flowers 
which are but momentary crystallizations, as 
it were, of the all-pervading life ; for all 
human beings who are budding, as some 
may be, in freedom because of their wilful 
service of the Law. Believe me that if birth 
and growth, change and death, increase 
in progeny, ascent in excellence, are the 
properties of all life, the laws of ethics and 
aesthetics, the obedience to law and mani- 
festation of this obedience, lie deep and 
essential in our very nature. 

Morals and the laws of beauty are not as 
the small-minded philosophers would have 
us believe. Duty is more than an idea 



u6 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

evolved by the exigencies of society. Duty 
is not merely a quality of good citizenship ; 
nor is it something contrary to our nature 
and taught us by priests that we may over- 
come our nature and save our souls. Duty 
lies at the very root of life ; it is life and 
growth ; it is work, service, renunciation. 
Duty, as I shall yet show you and you shall 
come to believe, is freedom itself. And 
when we understand better in science and 
in wisdom the true import of duty and the 
ethics of freedom, we shall come nearer to 
interpreting the master-law of life, which 
holds in leash all lesser laws, despite their 
apparent conflict and confusion. 

And as the daisy shines in beauty because 
it declares the moral equivalent of its being, 
so does all right living shine in some kind 
of radiant symmetry. And Beauty, being 
Truth, is as much a function in life as is 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 117 

obedience to the Law ; for the life well lived 
is the incarnation of Truth, and manifests its 
nature in Beauty. 

I have many more things that I would 
gladly say upon this vital subject. Again 
let me say that if you will have them, I 
will gladly tell you all I know upon some 
other occasion. For the present I must 
keep you upon the idea that just as the 
ordinarily accredited attributes are insepar- 
able components of life in its external uni- 
formity, so the religious sense is one with 
life. Deprive vitality of any one of its 
properties, and it ceases, it dies. Take from 
the Soul her growth, and she dwindles ; take 
from her the control of physical law, and 
the forces of Nature rend her ; take from 
her the possibility of increase, and her chief 
function in evolution vanishes ; take from 
her the duty to obey the law »of her being, 



n8 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

and she degenerates ; take from her the 
property of work, and she, even the beau- 
tiful Soul, becomes parasitic, and insults the 
eternal Law : and this is not the less true 
that a common ambition of her sons, in their 
worship of the graven images Society and 
Success, is to be parasitic upon their neigh- 
bours — to make others work that they may 
fatten. Lastly, take from the Soul her 
religious sense and its manifestation in the 
beauty of her face, and she becomes that 
for which I find but words that I dare not 
lightly use for any work created in beauty. 

Lastly, all life is endeavour ; all living is 
striving : and this strife is the ethical law 
at work within us now, as it has been at 
work from the beginning of our evolution. 
So far as this ethical law succeeds in enlist- 
ing in its service servants who both work in 
obedience and strive to better their work, 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 119 

the Law succeeds in the production of work 
which all pronounce beautiful ; it makes 
the faces of its servants shine in manifesta- 
tion of its might. I believe that the more 
you observe for yourselves the facts of 
Nature, the more surely will it be revealed 
to you that life cannot be divorced from 
religion without disaster. This the prophets 
have ever taught, and their words have 
been true only because their master is the 
Will of the Law. 

(iv). But I, have yet more to say concern- 
ing the religion of renunciation as observed 
in Nature ; for I would have you under- 
stand that renunciation is as much concerned 
in the fulfilment of the Law as is that 
reciprocal exchange of service upon which 
I laid so much stress in my first lecture. 

We may say that the sense of meek 
citizenship which we found among the 



120 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

sponge-individuals is, although indubitably 
evidence of altruism, still based upon egoism, 
seeing that each one serves because of his 
needs, and from no disinterested motives. 
True also is it that . in the daisy, where 
renunciation is more definite, the sacrifice 
of the masculine virility to the production 
of beauty may still be regarded as egoistic, 
seeing that definite gain may be won to 
themselves as well as to their two-sexed 
neighbours. Nevertheless, in the daisy an 
upward step in growth of obligation is mani- 
fest ; for if the yellow florets give pollen to 
their white-rayed servants, they do quite as 
much for other yellow ones in a neighbouring 
or distant daisy — and they do not serve as 
the white ones serve, with some measure 
of personal disinterestedness, and with the 
sense of the obligation to manifest the Law 
in beauty. 



Plate V. 




THE WILD GUELDER-ROSE {Viburnum Opulus) 

Showing inner fertile and outer neuter flowers 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 121 

And I am now going to tell you of 
the wild guelder-rose, because it carries us 
another step onwards. Here we have in each 
head of flowers a number of individuals, though 
few as compared with the daisy's (Plate V.)- 
These individuals live quite separately, and 
are not all seated on a common base ; each is 
obviously complete and independent. They 
seem to be congregated together in a sort 
of chosen, rather than compulsory, com- 
panionship. Theirs is a sort of society for 
mutual improvement and pleasure, rather 
than a co-operative workshop like the 
daisy. You know how different the flowers 
occupying the more central positions of the 
guelder-rose are from those forming the irre- 
gular outer zone. Each of the inner ones 
is a small, complete, but not strikingly 
pretty, bisexual flower. With these alone 
the guelder-rose tree would not be so 



122 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

beautiful an object in our woods ; for the 
creamy colour of its flowers, some half 
buried in the leafy green, some freely dancing 
in the wind, is all due to the large-petalled 
outer flowers, which herald to the world in 
banners of beauty the service in which their 
humbler companions rejoice. But these fine 
outer flowers, observe, have relinquished all 
personal purpose ; they are . neuters ; they 
take no share in the work of the guelder-rose 
tree ; they do not breathe, as do the leaves, 
to cull carbon from the air ; they do not 
drink with the roots to draw minerals from 
the soil for the strengthening of their 
habitation ; they produce neither pollen nor 
ova. That they may obey the Law in its 
need of them for a purpose transcending the 
immediate privileges of their fruitful neigh- 
bours, they have relinquished their rights in 
the Law's intent 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 123 

How then, you may ask, if they do no 
work either for themselves or for the com- 
munity, do they serve the law of the flower's 
being ? How, you will ask, do they declare 
the beauty of the guelder-rose in so un- 
equivocal a manner ? How, if they are not 
useful, do they become beautiful ? What 
truth do they manifest? 

Notwithstanding such just and most pro- 
fitable questions, we shall presently fully 
understand that it is only because these 
neuters serve that they are beautiful ; it is 
only because we instinctively have knowledge 
that this must be so that we call them 
beautiful. 

To me there are few things in Nature 
that more simply show us the meaning of 
Beauty than this wayside guelder-rose. Its 
beauty-flowers have renounced their highest 
privileges ; they have forgotten social laws 



124 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

whose very essence is the recognition of 
mutual advantage. And why ? That they 
may serve the Law which has need of 
them beyond their own life or the life of 
their fellows. And in this renunciation 
they declare the glory of the Law, they 
shine in manifesting the Truth which is the 
sun of the all-embracing brotherhood. 1 Yet 
these flowers which do no work for their 
community still serve, but in wider obliga- 
tion than their fellows, in larger sense of 
beauty. These neuters also could have no 
beauty but for their utility. The Law has a 

1 I confess I have some doubt whether the indis- 
putable fact that insects are necessary to fertilization 
fully explains the production of these neuter flowers, 
which, by the way, we find similarly displayed by 
the blue cornflower {Centaurea cyanus). The guelder- 
rose {Viburnum optdus) is first-cousin, so to speak, 
to the wayfaring tree {Viburnum lantana). Their 
conditions of soil and locality are identical, and the 
flowers differ only in the absence of neuters in the 
warfaring tree. Yet the flowers of the latter are no 
less surely fertilized than those of the guelder-rose. 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 125 

need of them transcending themselves and 
their community ; and, so far as they serve 
this need, they shine, and we call them 
beautiful. We are amply justified in believing 
that the Law must indeed have need of every 
living thing to serve and declare, however 
little we have understanding of the fact, and 
however strenuously some of us unimagina- 
tive human members of the vast community 
of life may doubt our dependence upon the 
eternal or deny the reality of the religious 
sense. 

I have at this point plunged and dragged 
you with me into the very springs of 
thought in whose waters philosophers love 
to bathe, in which some simple-minded men 
and women, unversed in lore or literature, 
find pure drink for their thirsty souls, 
good solace for their sorrowing hearts, but 
which springs the men of mere academic or 



126 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

commercial science are curiously apt to find 
unprofitable. 

In first speaking to you of the need of 
work and the nobility of service in the 
economy of life, because of the advan- 
tages thereby accruing to individual and 
society, I said no more than every man 
who is not a parasite would acclaim as 
good science and profitable to our belief 
in utilitarian ethics. But I then dived 
into the unknown, and spoke, in terms 
no less strong, of the Law's need of its 
creatures, and of their obligation to manifest 
the truth inherent in their creation. And 
it is for you individually to agree with or 
smile at me. 

To one who has never felt what Beauty is, 
who has not profited, nor his work profited, 
by its inspiration, I find I cannot speak. 
To talk with such a one would be nigh as 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 127 

reasonable as for a lark to sing of sunshine 
to a blind, burrowing mole. Many things are 
unknown to us, which, though they cannot 
be demonstrated on a blackboard or in a 
test-tube, yet manifest themselves in truth 
too deep for words, alike to those who are 
simple-hearted and to those whose wisdom 
is profound. We cannot prove to you in 
laboratories or from professorial chairs how 
mighty a thing is love, how weighty in 
reality is honour, how grand an item in our 
lives is this sense of abstract yet enduring 
truth. So little can we do these things 
that our philosophies and sciences should, 
in their worship of consistency, laugh at 
such paradoxes as a man dying for his 
country when his death would not serve it, 
or another dying in flames rather than be 
apostate from a creed that was absurd. And 
yet we know — some of us at any rate — that 



128 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

we would rather mankind ceased to advance 
in prosperity and education than that the 
most priceless of our emotional inheritances, 
love, honour, and this inherent sense of an 
unintelligible fitness in Beauty, should wane 
in our hearts. These undecipherable, un- 
seen, intangible ideas are bigger factors in 
our lives, we truly know, than dividends ; 
bigger elements in our nature than even 
intellectual riches. And it is in the deep 
appreciation of these realities, abstractions 
though they be, that the simple-minded 
and the uneducated may have closer touch 
with the Kingdom of Heaven than those 
exalted in pulpits or academies or ex- 
changes, because these babies in ignorance 
more truly, if mutely, live in service of 
the Law. 

Yet how is it, we must ask in this pursuit 
of understanding, that we have learned thus 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 129 

to reverence these abstract ideas, when they 
are so little regarded as social needs or as 
commercial assets ? Just because we hold 
in us, along with our other inheritances in 
feeling, an instinctive fund of common sense ; 
just because we know, somewhere deeper in 
our souls than broods our intelligence, that 
no such inheritance can live and last through 
the ages as these great emotions have done, 
save in virtue of their need to man, save 
because of their utility and necessity. Had 
the finer aspects of love, renunciation, honour, 
and such-like, no active share in the lives 
of men, they would have disappeared as 
useless and unprofitable long ages since — 
just as the eyes have gone from those animals 
who for aeons have lived and bred in light- 
less caves. The very fact that these abstract 
feelings are paramount in our lives, even 
though often debased to low uses, is proof 

9 



130 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

to our common-sense intelligence of their 
reality and utility ; and in their last and 
nobler uses, I say, they rise beyond and 
above the plane of serving either fellow 
man or society, and proclaim to us their 
relation in utility to the vast and, but for 
these inheritances, unknown depths of our 
being. It is in such wise that the most 
beautiful traits in man's nature — as, by 
common and instinctive consent, we admit 
the passion of a service in love and renun- 
ciation to be — proclaim that the truth of 
the Law, which has ordered these things, 
transcends the utilitarianism of mundane 
philosophies, politics, and religions. 

And so it is in our sense of the beauty 
given forth by the useless neuter flowers 
of the guelder-rose : for they proclaim that 
there are other duties than the serving of 
self and society ; that Truth is the law 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 131 

embracing all things ; that the Law is manifest 
in Beauty, and has need of its creatures for 
this high function. And this is not the less 
true that the transcendental can seldom be 
manifested save in living for others, although 
at times it rises into the heights of passionate 
renunciation not only of self, but even of the 
rights of society. Some will die rather than 
lie even to save a neighbour. 

Thus do daisy and guelder-rose show their 
sense of obligation and their privilege in 
renunciation. Thus do they justify my use 
of them to demonstrate our dependence 
upon a wonderful environment lying beyond 
mundane life and labour. Thus do they 
proclaim that even the flowers, if we may 
say they have sense of life, have also 
sense of obligation. And obligation means 
religion. 

I am still intent, I trust, in spite of any 



132 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

appearance of dogmatism in my argument, 
upon understanding any objections that seek 
expression in your thoughts. I should, I 
fear, think very ill of my audience's intel- 
lectual powers if they were not prepared 
with some opposition to my claims. That 
man who will believe in God because it 
is customary to do so is, in my mind, as 
poor a creature as one who would be willing 
to accept the propositions of Euclid as proven 
without troubling to understand them. 1 Many 
things, I admit and indeed hope, must be 
true that are beyond our understanding ; 
but, just because we are bound to this fact, 
we are less justified in setting limits to our 
understanding. Proof is one thing ; but I 

1 A man may be a heretic in the truth ; and if he 
believe things only because his pastor says so, or the 
assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, 
though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds 
becomes his heresy. — Milton's Areopagitica. 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 133 

think there is a form of understanding 
that ranks higher. To prove that a flower 
declares the glory of God is not possible 
to the greatest intellect that ever lived or 
ever shall live ; yet to understand some- 
thing of this sense of beauty in a flower, 
although it cannot be stated in words, is 
possible to the pure in heart, be they ever 
so dull in scholastic attainments. Is it 
not so? 

For my part I set out to prove to you 
nothing. My hope is but to make you 
ask bigger questions than some, at least, 
ever thought were held in Nature's catechism. 
And not the less do I seek to answer 
some of the questions that must arise in 
your minds perhaps in objection to the 
method of my argument ; or if I cannot 
answer them, I hope to show you, I repeat, 
how to look at some questions set by Nature 



134 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

in terms bigger than you at first could 
understand. 

The point I have reached is this : the 
relation of utility to ethics and aesthetics. 
For two of your questions at any rate are 
audible to me : one comes from the scientists, 
and the other from the idealists. The 
scientist, with eager attack, will assure me 
that all this beauty of the flowers, if such 
we must call it, is but utilitarian and 
prompted by self-interest; for by it the 
flowers attract the bees to the furtherance 
of cross-fertilization, just as the bees are 
not disinterestedly assisting the nuptials of 
the flowers by hawking about pollen, but 
are merely seeking honey and food for their 
hives. Do I mean, he will ask, in derision 
of my idealism, to deny that the gay and 
distinctive colours of flowers have primarily 
this utilitarian intent ? Do I mean to affirm 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 135 

that the guelder-rose's object in producing 
the neuter flowers is not to attract insects 
for the better propagation of its species ? 
Also, turning to ethics, he will assert that 
all morality is but the law of social advan- 
tage, and that social obligation is only such 
because of advantage to the individual ; and 
he will challenge me to show that the 
religious sense, if such there be, is other 
than the instinct of the individual as to 
his own interest in the preservation of the 
laws of social morality. It is largely because 
of this challenge, which is heralded with so 
brazen a trumpet through the woods of the 
soul's quiet hopes, that I am addressing you. 
And the idealist, with saddened heart, 
blames me for a utilitarian. He asks me 
whether I do not degrade the finest idea 
alike of beauty and morals by proving them 
to be, after all, only utilitarian. 



136 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

As briefly as possible I will reply to 
both animadversions. 

In the first place our scientist finds 
sufficient explanation of the meadow's gaiety 
and garden's delight in the fact that those 
vegetable lives have best survived and pro- 
pagated their species who have, accidentally, 
I suppose, produced such symmetry of form 
and brilliance of colour as make them 
easily distinct from afar to the bees and 
butterflies who seek their honey. And this 
mutual dependence is not theory, as you 
know, but fact. The red clover, for instance, 
cannot exist in the Antipodes because the 
humble-bee cannot be acclimatized there ; 
and without this insect to carry pollen from 
anthers to pistils, the species dies. Those 
flowers, the biologist will say, which give 
best honey to bees set out the gayest flags to 
mark their habitations ; and certain flowers 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 137 

thus become entirely dependent for their 
species' persistence upon the ministration 
of insects. In their supply of honey and 
brave proclamation as to where in the 
meadows such honey is sold, the flowers 
reveal the principle of a utilitarianism 
which, in the simple language of those 
who are not philosophers, is recognized as 
beauty. 

Let us consider for a moment this mutual 
dependence of insect and flower. We have 
on the one hand highly organized, intellectual 
animals with brains and five senses, legs, 
wings, and muscles ; on the other hand we 
have lowly vegetables lacking nervous system 
and brain, rooted to the soil, chained in 
submission to ordeal, having no knowledge of 
life beyond some dim sense of wind and rain, 
light and darkness, and perhaps an acknow- 
ledgment of the wonderful when the big 



138 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

bee drops upon their slender forms to rob 
and to fertilize. This mutual dependence, 
I believe, cannot be explained except by the 
recognition of a law in evolution, that held 
in view, during the building up of the flowers, 
the building up also of the insects and their 
communities. It can be understood and 
explained only by the law of evolution, 
and then only if we hold that the law had 
cognizance of the advantages in mutual de- 
pendence that should accrue to both flowers 
and insects. Otherwise we must suppose an 
intellectual sense on the part of the flowers' 
themselves, a foresight in evolution on the 
part of the insects themselves ; whereas 
the understanding and foresight belong to 
the Law. This mutual dependence of flower 
and insect upon a common property, the 
appreciation of colour and consequent mani- 
festation of beauty, justifies us in placing 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 139 

these species in a class together, though they 
are as widely different in their structure 
as any two species could be. And I 
maintain that such system of classification 
will not be the less just that it is not scientific, 
but transcendental ; not factual, but ideal. 
I maintain, further, that the law responsible 
for the evolution, side by side, of insect 
and flower could have brought them to- 
gether only by the holding of these two 
domains of its creation together in a common 
intent. On the other hand, if such a theory 
is in opposition to our facts (and I main- 
tain that it is nothing of the kind) ; if 
this mutual dependence of those widely 
different species is not the outcome of a 
law embracing both ; then the mutual service 
is all accident 

But not even the biologist is always 
scientific, I fear. For him to admit such 



140 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

influence as the accidental in the production 
of life is the rankest heresy conceivable — rank 
as is the superstition of the philosopher's 
stone in the nostrils of the chemist — rank as 
is belief in the earth's flatness to the soul 
of the astronomer. For what do we mean 
by accident? That which comes about 
in manner contrary to the ordered and usual 
course of events. Law, I take it, is the 
ordered sequence and unfolding of events ; 
and vital law differs from mere physical 
law solely in this, that purpose rules its 
operations. All that life does is done for 
the attainment of some object: all vital 
action is purposed, whatever the process may 
be that has instigated the desire or purpose 
leading to action. Whether or no this is 
the truth about life, accident cannot be 
defined otherwise than in one of two ways. 
Accident is either that which was not 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 141 

expected, or that which happens in opposition 
to, or in different form from, the supposed 
normal course of events. If by accident the 
biologist means the former, we must praise 
his somewhat accidental, because unexpected, 
modesty; for he admits that the limits of 
his narrow theory of evolution do not cover 
all phenomena. If by accident, on the other 
hand, he means the abnormal, that which is 
beyond the pale of the Law, then I advertise 
him as no scientist : for he holds that the 
paramount force in evolution is the influence 
of the illegal ; he claims possession of a 
philosopher's stone that can transmute 
all law and phenomena into that which 
is meaningless ; he pins his faith upon 
No-law. 

No, the beauty of the flowers is not a 
mere imaginary by-product of mutual utility, 
but is the outward and visible manifestation, 



142 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

the deliberate, determinate manifestation of 
the inward and transcendental Idea which, 
greater than the law of the evolution of 
species, because it has itself evolved that 
law, embraces the insect- and flower-world 
in a community of mutual service and in- 
dividual manifestation. Do not take my 
word for it : spend your lives in searching 
for accident, that most stupid of man's 
creations in slothfulness, and you will 
never find it. Law is eternal and ubiqui- 
tous : that which is bereft of the Law is 
vanished ; that which the Law has not 
conceived lives only in the foolishness of 
our limitations. 

And although you scientists may affirm 
that I have not answered your objections, 
I have put to you some questions which 
you must answer for me before I can teach 
you further. Why and how the initial steps 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 143 

in the evolution of bee desirous of honey 
and unknowingly bartering pollen, or of 
flower desiring fertility and giving honey 
to the brown-hued priests of Hymen, — why 
and how such initial steps were taken in 
beginnings long before such beginnings could 
give evidence of a utility we find only in 
their consummation — this question you shall 
at least ask, though the only answer may 
appear to you unscientific. Yet the answer, 
though it cannot be demonstrated in material 
facts, is but the recognition of a law greater 
than those we can demonstrate ; while the 
alternative, the theory of accident, gives the 
lie to man's highest intellectual faculty, his 
instinctive belief in the Law as the very 
nature and soul of things. And if I have 
not answered your objection, at any rate I 
have made you see that the fact of this 
utilitarian give-and-take between flower and 



144 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

insect must arise also in obedience to the 
great Law which is beyond the knowledge 
alike of gifted bee and guelder-rose. If I 
have to admit our mental limitations on 
account of our ignorance, I have neverthe- 
less made you see that these limitations, 
although we affirm beauty to be the outcome 
of the insects' and flowers' mutual serving, 
do not deprive us of a right to explain this 
beauty as the expression of transcendental 
obedience. 

And you scientists, just as you would set 
limits to the operations of a law of which 
the furthest-seeing of us have but the 
glimmering of an understanding, you seek 
also to find the limits of virtue in what you 
consider to be common-sense utility ; and 
in this wise you must object to my enlarging 
our conception of ethics beyond what is 
demonstrable as fact. And yet I am, 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 145 

throughout my attempt at interpreting 

virtue and beauty, adopting your own 

theory, and saying that nothing is good 

which is not serving, nothing is fair except 

in so far as it proclaims the law of its 

service. I even endorse your apotheosis of 

common-sense : but with this difference, 

that I attempt to give it even a higher 

place among the gods of our intellectual 

household than you would approve, and 

affirm it to be an instinct so priceless that 

it must stand side by side with the religious 

sense. For I say that when the goddess 

Common-sense tells us we have free-will, we 

must believe in the freedom of will for all 

we are worth ; when she speaks of love 

transcending self-advantage, we dare not 

question her ; when she tells some of us 

that Beauty illuminates the firmament of 

truth, we have no right, because we are 

10 



146 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

scientific men, to call our goddess a mere 
graven image. 

In my third lecture I shall discuss further 
the reality of the religious sense in man as 
a sense that transcends social obligation. 
For the present I claim to be in large 
agreement with the utilitarian. But if I 
admit that ethics have in view no more than 
the welfare of the individual, the community, 
and the race, it is upon the understanding 
that individual, community, and race hold 
essential in their very nature ideals that 
transcend dividends and are inimical even 
to contentment. 

And now for the second question, which 
I guessed that you idealists were asking. 
Do I not, you ask, lower our exalted 
meaning of the ethical and the beautiful in 
finding that, when all is said, they depend 
upon utility? Is not, you ask, our very 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 147 

conception of morality something which 
transcends advantage? Do I not degrade 
art to mere commercialism when I say that 
our sense of the beautiful is but our sense 
of what is successful ? Have I forgotten 
that I declared transcendentalism to be 
hope or belief in that which is paramount 
to the modus Vivendi? 

And if you ask me these questions, and 
do so partly because of the things I am 
seeking to teach you, you must know that 
I ask them also, and in the asking find 
answer. You feel with me that it is alto- 
gether essential that we should be clear 
upon these points, not only for the sake 
of our own intellectual honour — the most 
precious perhaps of all honours — but that 
we may present a firm front to those who 
say that creeds are but policies of insurance 
against certain unpleasant contingencies, 



148 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

invented by mad fanatics or greedy priest- 
hoods. 

While we should deny, with our very 
lives if need be, such imputations upon the 
saints and prophets of the earth, such mean 
belittling of those whom, in our better 
common-sense, we know to be the greatest 
among men and women, we will yet admit 
to the full, as I have just now declared, the 
theory of the utilitarian philosopher : we 
will join with him in affirming that nothing 
is good which does not serve, that nothing 
is beautiful which does not express its 
service. This must be the creed alike of 
utilitarian and idealist. But the idealist's 
admission will be fuller than the utilitarian's, 
because it transcends his, because it declares 
that life serves the Law in ways that alto- 
gether transcend knowledge and philosophy. 
The beauty of the sunflower and daisy is 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 149 

such because it transcends their obligation 
to their species, and shines in recognition 
of a law that embraces needs beyond those 
of the natural order, Compositae ; because 
they have some sense, transcending the 
understanding of the botanist and zoologist, 
of affinities with the bees and the butterflies, 
some dim feeling of privilege in serving the 
great world that includes and yet is beyond 
and above themselves. 

Yet I can imagine an idealist who may still 
be dissatisfied with this definition of faith ; 
for he feels that any attempt at complete 
understanding alike of Nature or of such 
divine conceptions as Truth and Virtue, 
Beauty and Service, must be impious. He 
would rather be mystic than scientist, 
rather worship in meek admission of ignor- 
ance than sing praises awakened by the 
understanding of God's ways. If he do so 



150 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

think, we part company, without further 
criticism, because together we should but 
be seeking that which only one of us 
desires. 

But I claim the privilege of the rostrum, 
and must have the last word. I ask the 
mystic idealist, and he may be Calvinist or 
Papist, Evangelical or High Churchman, if he 
will conceive of a system of morality or of 
beauty that shall be altogether independent 
of utilitarian intent ? He would perhaps 
make charity so absolutely dissociated from 
advantage that bread cast upon the waters 
could by no possibility return after many 
days ; and the wonderful weaving of human 
society into a fabric designed for some 
unknown purpose, so that not a strand of its 
warp is weak without the whole suffering, 
and not a thread of its weft shines but 
the whole is enlightened, cannot appear to 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 151 

him admirable. Fori our part, nevertheless, 
the fact that virtue must bring its own 
reward, perhaps after many days, and in a 
sense not measurable in terms of mundane 
commercialism, in no way can detract from 
the purity and disinterestedness of such 
virtue. It is one thing to cast bread upon 
the waters because it may return to us, 
and we get the credit of our charity ; and 
it is another thing to share our last crust 
and find, despite our consequent hunger, 
comfort in the thought of the simple-hearted 
that God can give us bread to cure all 
hunger, and that, in our self-denial, we gain 
an eternal reward. The question is not so 
much whether right action is rewarded by 
its consequences, as whether the prospective 
gain is ethically desirable. To conceive 
of a system of ethics that is purposeless or 
unutilitarian is as ridiculous as to conceive 



152 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

that the omnipotence of God will be satis- 
factorily proved only when He is shown to 
create without purpose. That, I take it, is 
more than the most exacting atheist would 
demand in his idea of a God he could worship! 
To conceive of a system of ethics that is 
purposeless, that loses merit if shown to be 
advantageous, is to suppose a spirit of tyranny 
and no-law to be paramount in the universe. 

No, we can hardly reason with the 
mystic ; nor can we reason with one who 
claims that everything is revealed. Yet, as 
there is mystery in the beauty of the daisy 
and miracle in the work of the guelder-rose, 
so there is science and law ever revealing to 
us that, beyond and behind even these 
common things, which we love the more just 
because of their mystery, there is a divineness 
of utilitarian intent, a grace of service to man 
and all his brothers in the universe of life. 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 153 

I crave one word more on the subject of 
the religion of renunciation, because I would 
have you understand that it is an absolutely 
real factor in life. For the moment I am not 
discussing its relation to man, though we may 
see with a little thought that even his species 
cannot escape from renouncing self in an 
unrecognized sense of the Law's needs. I 
would have you realize how much it is part 
of the very nature of life to possess the sense 
that individual behests are secondary not 
only to social needs, but to the Law's needs 
of the service of its creatures. Nor is there 
cruelty on the part of the Law that it demands 
this sacrifice. The lark feels no hardship 
in sitting upon her eggs while her mate is 
delighting his heart in the sky : yet she has 
renounced her personal joy in exchange for 
a peaceful serving of the law which has 
need of her fledglings ; indeed, it is because 



154 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

of the mother's service in the great mystery 
of life that the joys of maternity are so 
real in their ideality. Both the bird's and the 
human mother's love-hope is what we know it 
to be, not because of the consciously looked 
for reward of their waiting, but because of 
the deep instinct of serving and union with 
the transcendental power which we wise 
men yet say we can know nothing about. 
That the bird feeds her nestlings with worms 
before she satisfies her own hunger, I 
can well believe ; that the starving woman 
gives her milk to her baby even though 
knowing that thereby her own need of food 
becomes greater, is matter of fact. There 
may be a mundane cruelty in the woman's 
hunger, and more in the fact that she cannot 
feed the little one who looks to her for all 
things ; but she never ascribes cruelty to her 
instinct that her baby's need must be satisfied 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 155 

before her own, even though she is of use 
in the world and his use is only prospective. 

Even in this terrible law of evolution, 
which often looks to us like an inexorable, 
merciless tyranny, sacrificing the weak and 
the failing that the stronger may survive 
and advance the excellence of the species, 
I find no cruelty. For lion meets lion in 
deadly conflict that the better of the two 
of them may survive for the furtherance 
of the Law's needs ; and to them the fight 
is the delight of the moment. Each is 
willing for — nay, is driven to — the contest by 
the unknown Law's impelling, which is their 
instinct each to make and assert his personal 
excellence and fitness for survival. Even, 
I suspect, in the destruction of the maimed 
by the strong we may perceive, not so 
much cruelty, as the strange desire, un- 
tempered by love or mercy, that only the 



156 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

fit should survive ; indeed, I think this 
instinct may be actually merciful to the unfit, 
if his fellows can save him from hindering 
the Law. 

But these points take us too far afield from 
the present topic : I have touched upon them 
that you may not think I am optimistically 
declining to look in the face all the 
things that to us who suffer and love 
must be horrors in the Law's workings. 
At the moment I want you to realize 
that, so far from there being hardship 
in the Law's need of our work, and in 
our renunciation of personal delights, it 
may be quite the reverse. If the hopes 
upon which the best citizens build their 
lives are based upon truth, then self-sacrifice, 
being but obedience to the Law's higher 
need of us, is our greater delight and reason- 
able privilege. So strong in some men and 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 157 

women is this instinctive desire for renuncia- 
tion that it takes foolish forms — foolish 
because unutilitarian, foolish because they 
suppose an unreasoning God will be gratified 
by a self-renunciation that is purposeless. 
It is the instinctive desire for serving God 
in some great way that makes the willing 
martyr glad in his heart ; and it is no less the 
same instinct, foolish though its manifesta- 
tions be, that induces senseless asceticism — 
senseless when purposeless and furthering 
no ideal of the Law, the state, or the person. 
It is the desire for such service, I think, 
although it is often basely accentuated by 
a desire for propitiating an unreasoning and 
purposeless Deity, that lies at the root of 
many fastings and sacrifices, and impels 
ignorant and foolish devotees to cast their 
children and themselves beneath the wheels 
of the Juggernaut car. 



158 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

Indeed, I doubt whether the Law is so 
regardless of the individuals of a given 
species as would appear from its dominant 
need of the species' betterment. Much that 
we call suffering appears as such only be- 
cause we imagine what our own pain would 
be if we were placed in like circumstances. 
In the same stupid spirit we blame a man 
for failure in doing what is easy to ourselves. 
One in agony with toothache cannot believe 
that another, having as bad a tooth, has yet 
no pain. One knowing no temptation to 
steal because he is cursed with a superfluity 
of worldly goods, cannot judge of the small- 
ness of sin in a brother who takes from him 
what he does not need. It is better to be 
hungry, even though the hunger bring 
temptation, than to be surfeited, even though 
compulsory virtue is the recompense. We 
cannot measure either the cruelties or the 



THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION 159 

mercies of the Law : for judgment may be 
salvation ; and profit, as held by most men, 
may be damnation. Similarly the life of 
renunciation, even when ordered in wise 
obedience, may look hateful, even cruel, to 
one who finds in pleasure a sufficient reason 
for living : to such a one it were as useless 
to talk of the joy of living the life needed 
by the Law as it were to argue with a 
Hottentot on the solaces of literature. 

No, talk how you will as to the necessity 
of all virtue being disinterested and beauty 
exalted above utility, you cannot evade the 
fact that virtue has excellence only so far 
as it brings the Kingdom of God into our 
lives and thus brings us joy ; that beauty is 
such only so far as it reveals the truth of 
God's intent, be it immediate or prospective 
in its fulfilment. 



The Religion of Freedom 



161 



II 



Ill 

THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 

You will have suspected from my pre- 
ceding lectures that I observe a process 
of evolution or advance, in slow, perhaps 
erratic, yet certain steps, from the most 
elementary indications of the religious sense 
in structureless forms of life, up to its mani- 
festation in our relatively exalted selves. 
And this subservience to the Law results 
first in the establishment of ethical obligation 
to the Law, that is of conscious and wilful 
obedience, and secondly in the development 
of that freedom which appears to be the 
purposed outcome of the Law's intent But 
163 



164 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

the process of the development of a purely- 
passive sense of obligation into a consciously 
active sense of ethical privilege can hardly 
be traced within the compass of one lecture. 
To attempt this would involve an examina- 
tion of the evolution of self-consciousness, 
through which alone can come understanding 
of our relation to the law of life. This is 
too wide a theme even to touch upon now, 
and I must be content in this lecture with 
examining the bearing of religious obligation 
upon the development of ethical freedom. 
Such a promise must, I fear, sound formid- 
able enough ; yet I think this lecture will 
prove easier than my other two. 

But before I start my argument I want 
to say a preliminary word in defence of my 
method. You might casually think that 
because the whole of this lecture will be 
devoted to a consideration of the relation 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 165 

of man to the law of his being, I have 
abandoned my position of scientist. But 
it is not so. For what is science but the 
study and understanding of facts and the 
laws which their relation to one another as 
cause and effect reveal ? And man is surely 
not the less a good subject for this method 
of study that, in some of his properties, 
experimental analysis will hardly help us 
to their interpretation. I maintain that pre- 
cisely as we can study the nature of a sponge 
and a daisy in its philosophical aspect by 
scientific process, so we can study man ; and, 
in the same method with which I began I shall 
end. Even in man, I maintain, the religious 
sense is susceptible of proof. Yet this 
proof is not found in the method of some 
theologians, whose very basis of argument 
depends upon the assumption that the Scrip- 
tures are divinely inspired in a sense contrary 



1 66 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

to necessity, reason, and facts. In a pro- 
founder sense the evidence of inspiration 
may be clear enough : as all work shines 
in beauty the more finely it is inspired by 
the Law, so in the Scriptures we may find 
intrinsic evidence of inspiration. Neverthe- 
less, we cannot present this assumed, or to 
some of us revealed, evidence of the inspira- 
tion of the gospels as fact ; and therefore 
the method of the less intellectual theologian 
is not scientific. His position may be 
sound or it may not : we are not now 
considering it. We are seeking facts that 
shall scientifically corroborate or refute his 
teachings that God has given us talents 
and holds us responsible for their increase. 
This is my preliminary word. 

(i). You will perhaps remember that I 
promised in this my third lecture to discuss 
further the reality of this religious sense as a 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 167 

factor in our inner consciousness. This is the 
more imperative seeing that it is common 
among those who would be fashionable in 
their intellectual garments to question the 
reality of this transcendental sense. Many 
indeed profess to have no feeling of that need 
of touch with the infinite which is so powerful 
an impulse in some to live cleanly and 
to better the world for those who shall yet 
come. Others, although not devoid of the 
religious sense, are so genuinely shocked by 
the patronage of religion because of its 
respectability or fine traditions — are so 
rightly contemptuous of such as go to church 
for example to their servants, or who grind 
the faces of the poor to parade their re- 
ligious zeal in finery, — that they prefer to 
boast an honest agnosticism. And others, 
yet again, are so absorbed in their pur- 
suits, be they household drudgery, scientific 



i68 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

investigations, classical erudition, politics, or 
mere money-making, that there is no room 
left in their hearts for this sense to germinate 
and grow, though it is foremost among their 
inheritances and priceless even in its work- 
a-day worth. Be the reason what it may, 
the objector commonly explains the religious 
instinct by affirming it to be the inheritance 
of a superstition instilled into the people in 
past ages, whether by ignorant and greedy 
priesthoods or by timid and tyrannical 
thrones, in order that the multitudes may 
be kept from a knowledge of their rights 
and their power. 

Our environment, on the other hand, 
such a one will say, teems with appeals 
to our altruistic sense on behalf of suffer- 
ing humanity ; our paths are beset with 
churches and cemeteries, Bibles and illu- 
minated texts, all of which stimulate our 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 169 

fear of death, if, indeed, they are not re- 
sponsible for it ; and our conversation is 
interlarded with phrases like love, honour, 
justice, etc., which have assumed transcen- 
dental equivalents, although meaning nothing 
beyond personal advantage and social ex- 
pediency. Such factors as these, our agnostic 
says — some of them necessary to society, 
although misinterpreted by priests and poets ; 
some of them merely the fantasies of fear — 
form an environment from which we cannot 
escape. Between them they conjure up a 
condition of mind which, he thinks, must be 
artificial because not universal, and imaginary 
because not a measurable equivalent. And 
this is the condition of mind, he holds, which 
is called by the priests, by some wise men, 
and by many who are intellectually un- 
cultured, the sense of religion. 

Some among the best of good citizens 



170 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

think and boast that they do not possess 
the religious sense and do not desire it 
They mount on stilts, look down on the 
heads of those who walk on the mere legs 
of their inheritance, and forget that their 
position is remarkable rather than normal. 
They think they have supplanted part of 
their birthright, and do better without it ; 
and then, in natural sequence of thought, 
they hold that it never was real. Or, if 
they do not thus express themselves, they 
claim that, even if the religious or super- 
stitious sense does still exist for some belated 
wanderers in evolution, these had best follow 
their own example and rise superior to its 
influence. And they have not yet learned 
that, in certain common contingencies, a 
stilted elevation of superiority may prove 
disastrously untenable. Finally, they argue 
that, even should the religious sense be in 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 171 

any way beneficial to individual or society, 
it is none the less the production of the 
environment and is not essential in the 
nature of man. 

In conclusion of my claim as to the reality 
of the religious sense I must detain you 
for a few minutes, while I answer these 
two objections, the first being (a) that the 
sense is not real because many do not, or 
think they do not, possess it ; and the second 
(b) that the sense is merely an artificial 
product of an artificial environment, and is 
not natural to man. 

(a) Assuming for the moment that I am 
dealing with one really devoid of the religious 
sense — that is, of conscious ethical obliga- 
tion towards any idea beyond the needs of 
individual or society — I find I am compelled 
to consider either that he is incapable of 
seeing the very data of our discussion, or 



172 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

that myself am illogical in producing purely 
unreal fact for argument. But if the sense 
be real, it stands to reason that he is beyond 
the pale of understanding that it is so. No 
argument of a Tennyson will make one 
whose soul dwells only within the limitations 
of a physiological laboratory understand the 
truth lying in poetry. No amount of evi- 
dence adduced by the lark could make 
the mole believe that the light of heaven 
was better than all the earthy advantages 
denied to the winged priest of the sun : 
either the lark is a fool or the mole is 
demented. Either the poet trespasses 
beyond the confines of reason or the 
physiologist is enslaved by an unenterprising 
contentment with his prison-walls. Either, 
I repeat, the poet or the physiologist is 
insane : a point for our determination of 
prime importance. But since there be poets 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 173 

who are wise and physiologists who at times 
walk the meadows in delight, they may find 
an agreement, if they will, deep in their 
common nature. 

I very much question, moreover, if the 
sense is really absent in any who are sane, 
or who have not destroyed the nature of 
their fine inheritance by living in opposition 
to the Law, in vice, luxury, or cynicism. 
What honest man is there, let me ask you, 
however much he may deplore what he 
considers the lack of reason in the churches 
or resent the intolerance of dogmatics, who 
is incapable of rising above the demands 
of his reason and tacitly asserting that he 
is servant of a transcendental law ? How 
so? my opponent will ask. 

Even a bad man, I answer, may upon 
occasions in his life be confronted with some 
deep need of action that transcends what 



174 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

is called reason and mundane justification. 
Many years ago men used to talk more 
about their personal honour than, most 
fortunately, they do now ; it often implied 
little more than a readiness to take offence 
at any doubt cast upon their purity of motive 
or truthfulness of word, whether such 
suspicion was or was not justified. It was 
a miserable ideal, because a mockery of the 
truth ; and yet it was perhaps better than 
no ideal. And because of their instinctive 
feeling that the true ideal had claims upon 
them, they would defend its semblance 
with their lives if need be, putting its justice 
to the test of the sword. I am not extolling 
the custom any more than I would the 
instinct to strike any man who stands in 
our way ; but I do yet think it indicates 
an innate feeling that even the most wretched 
and self-serving men have in them a mighty 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 175 

respect for the ideal man which they know 
they represent in some fashion, however 
much their lives may contradict it. They 
feel, although inconsistently with reason 
and profit, that whenever the honour of 
a man is at stake because an accusation, 
just or unjust, is allowed to pass unchallenged, 
they must risk their lives in defence of the 
ideal. Of course, such a man never attempts 
to justify his action in this way : he merely 
fights because he is angry and would rather 
fight than not do so. Nevertheless, I believe 
he is impelled by a dim, unreasoned sense 
of obligation to ethical ideal, and, brute 
though he be, will fight in its service. Thus, 
I say, he gives evidence of possessing some 
measure of religious sense, though it is 
purely involuntary; though it perhaps pro- 
claims the man who possesses but does 
not justify it to be ethically degraded below 



176 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

the sponges of the ocean or the flowers of 
the field. 

But this involuntary manifestation of the 
strength of our ideal as to what a man 
should be may take high place in action, and, 
when welded to some understanding — that is, 
when fought for in deliberation and not in 
anger — it becomes, I think, a potent proof 
of the activity of the religious sense. I am 
now supposing the case of the virtuous 
citizen who yet denies that he has any 
feeling or desire for religion. For instance, 
I conceive that many a man of this descrip- 
tion, if blackmailed, will run all the risks 
of exposure rather than sanction the lie 
and insult given to his personal honour ; 
and in this virtuous citizen the personal 
honour may truly symbolize the ideal, and 
thus may be worthy of protection. As a 
good citizen he will of course be strengthened 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 177 

in his determination to face the accusation 
by the urgent need of ridding society of 
its enemy. But beyond this, I believe, is 
an ideal sense of honour and justice, and 
of obligation to serve the ideal rather 
than the laws of expediency and utility, 
although the fulfilment of this duty may 
prove unprofitable, and possibly disastrous, 
to a man's self and his family. 

Again, many a scoffer at religion, many 
a useless society-lounger, many a one even 
who degrades his manhood by driving 
women into hell, may upon occasion rise 
into the very noblest heights of voluntary 
self-sacrifice. His commanding officer, his 
regiment or his country may demand any 
impossible task they please, and he will 
face certain death rather than betray his 
manhood ; he will die rather than surrender, 
though the battle be lost. And what will 

12 



178 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

impel him to such unutilitarian course of 
action ? Nothing whatever but the religious 
sense. Even if it be altogether compulsive 
of his actions, even though he obeys the 
high ideal because something makes him 
do so, and without his voluntary consent 
to its urging, it is no less evidence of the 
activity of the religious sense. And when 
such soldier has a moment or hour in which 
to think out his course of action, when he 
determines to sacrifice his life and renounce 
even his family's need of him rather than 
see the honour of his country derided, then 
he rises, I think, into the very heights 
of ethical service, and does more for self, 
for country, for the eternal law of his being 
than he or we have the faintest conception 
of. And because he loved honour much, 
much should be forgiven him. 

And correspondingly, I think, no one of 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 179 

us, however much he may emotionally or 
intellectually, in converse or in observance, 
proclaim his belief in the religious sense, 
can know how strong or how weak it is 
within him until he has been tried under 
fire. Be this as it may, the religious sense 
is absolutely real, perhaps the most essen- 
tially real of all our inheritances from the 
unknown ultimate parentage whence we are 
come. 

(b) But I have still the second objection 
to dispose of — namely, that the religious 
sense, granted it be an active force, is but 
the artificial product of an artificial environ- 
ment. This claim you shall soon understand 
is too foolish to need many words. 

But before clearing up the point — and 
I think it is of utmost importance that we 
should do so — I want to make perfectly plain 
what we mean by the word environment. We 



180 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

may say that every person lives in two worlds, 
one inside and one outside. They are both 
essential to existence. The inside world can 
include as much of the outside as it takes 
in ; and our eyes and ears, our senses of 
touch, smell, and taste put us into com- 
munication with this outside world : we may 
say they are messengers who bring news 
of what is profitable in the external world 
for the inner citadel's enlargement. The 
more good things these messengers bring us, 
the finer grows this inner life and the further 
the citadel extends its walls. Thus does the 
environment contribute to our inner life, our 
maintenance and growth. To use another 
metaphor, the environment is the soil in 
which we live, and never the life itself. 
And whether the environment serves us with 
nourishment or hardship, it is, according to 
the evolutionists, the contention with and 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 181 

surmounting of environmental difficulties that 
have led to the growth of great lives from 
small beginnings, and the elaboration of 
complex species from a simple and common 
parentage. The acorn grows into the oak- 
tree because of the ever-increasing power 
of the roots to contend with the hard soil ; 
because of the increase of strength to resist 
the wind that seeks to break the sapling ; 
because of the tree's ever-growing vitality 
to withstand excess of rain and hot sun 
that would rot or wither its blossoms. The 
soil and the rain and the sun are the en- 
vironment of the oak-tree ; they operate as 
much in beneficence as in discipline. For 
the world outside us affords us means of 
subsistence and increase of strength in food 
and drink and things to contend with. 
Moreover, if ever the environment proves 
too hard and threatens starvation, be it to 



182 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

our hopes or to our mere subsistence, we 
suffer, and the beneficent angel, Pain, enters 
our walls to warn and admonish us. On 
the other hand, if ever the environment offers 
ease so great that we grow fat, our strength 
is enfeebled : then indeed the power of 
existence may be so weakened that we die, 
and this time perhaps without warning. 
Nor can we forget that the environment in 
which men and women of exalted life find 
their subsistence is made up of other men's 
lives, whose homesteads may be sweetly 
tended or overrun with weeds. 

Thus we cannot explain anything by 
affirming that it is merely the result of 
our environment, although at the same time 
we must admit that without environment 
nothing would have been evolved. The eye 
could never have been created but for an 
environment of things to be seen ; and 



._•.__.. 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 183 

things to be seen could never have called 
forth the faculty of seeing them unless the 
individuals who developed the visual sense 
had, even before they could see, possessed 
the germinal, prospective faculty of seeing. 
This is absolutely clear and axiomatic, is it 
not ? If so, I pray you keep it before your 
minds in all your reflections upon evolution, 
heredity, and environment, and you will, I 
think, find it a clue to the many conflicts of 
theory and dogma with which we are beset. 
The environment is essential, but it is 
not all ; the capacity for growth in the 
acquisition of function is essential, but it 
could do nothing without material. Germinal 
possibility and nutritive environment are the 
father and mother of all vital phenomena. 
The environment alone can generate nothing. 
To argue that, because the idea of religion 
is the result of an artificial environment 



184 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

and therefore not essential in man's nature, 
it must be excluded from our data, were as 
absurd as it were to discount the importance 
of the environment in evolving any or all 
other items in his nature. Nor must we call 
this or that point in the life and things 
surrounding us artificial because they are 
the work of man's hands. You do not think 
the nest of the bird is part of an artificial 
environment because the bird has built it ; 
nor can you call man's houses, markets, 
churches, unnatural because he has built 
them ; nor his clothes, pockets, and gim- 
cracks the mere necessities of an artificial 
environment because he was not born with 
them glued to his back. No more can we, 
as scientists, study the nature of man with- 
out seeking to understand those ideas and 
abstractions which he calls religion and con- 
science ; although, but for the environment 



iiir I'miii i if 1 1 ih ii ' I " ii ' 1 1 "' - t : 1 iiiiiiiui i iilfii iiiihinir if i 11 —I 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 185 

which man has in part made for himself, as 
the birds their nests, they had never attained 
their present degree of influence. 

Yet nature is made better by no mean 

But nature makes that mean: so, over that art, 

Which you say adds to nature, is an art 

That nature makes . . . 

. , The art itself is nature. 

So that, whatever our environment does 
for us in creating our creed, be this environ- 
ment church-steeples or factory-chimneys ; 
however much influence these have in the 
manufacture of our faith or in persuading 
us of the advantages of science ; the en- 
vironment alone has done nothing for us 
save in virtue of our proclivities. Yet will 
we accord all honour to our mother environ- 
ment, even notwithstanding the loathsome 
stuff she often physics us with. For she 
it is who awakens in us the understanding 
of great needs. She puts before us the 



186 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

sufferings of our fellows, and teaches us the 
joy which comes of burdens in sympathy ; 
she shows how our religious sense must 
live and thrive and even serve our needs ; 
and she reveals to us, in forms of beauty, 
the form and office of the Law. She shows 
how we may live in truth, how we may die 
in the faith that all is well with the Law. 
It is she that gives strength to our wavering 
inspiration and teaches us to set our in- 
heritance of hope against our wages of 
despair. And she it is who teaches us that 
we must work in service of ourselves so far 
as the Law has need of our strength ; in 
service of society so far as our fellows have 
need of us and we of them ; and in service, 
yet again, in renunciation of self, and even 
sometimes of our duties to the State, so 
far as we have need of freedom. Of 
which freedom as the high outcome of 



ttLjatmA-a MM kMM « flfkba m^mM Uidi^i.*. :. .__»- 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 187 

the religious sense I shall presently speak. 
Once and for all I dismiss the accusation 
that, because the environment has had share 
in awakening the religious sense, the latter 
is to be discredited. The environment has 
created nothing ; yet nothing that was ever 
created became, save in virtue of the 
ministrations of the environment. 

And I think I have satisfactorily answered 
the objection of those who, because they do 
not pray themselves, or because they witness 
insincerity among those who use forms of 
prayer, deny the reality of the religious 
sense. 

But now we come to a more difficult 
question, yet one which it is our need to 
face fairly and answer truly : for, to me 
at least, it is of greater import than any 
I have yet put before you. It is a question, 
I say, that must be faced honestly ; for if 



188 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

we shirk it, our faith and hope in man and 
God must go — and then there is no mercy 
left for our suffering. We dare not refuse 
to face any danger because our fears have 
painted it in terror ; for this very dread 
which stands in our way may prove the 
only thing that could save us from our 
fears and ourselves. The question now 
before us is this : how comes it about, if the 
religious sense is intrinsic in life, that man, 
notwithstanding his increasing excellence, 
seems in danger of losing it altogether? 

(ii). If the Law had no further need of 
its creatures than the excellence they would 
attain through acquiescing in renunciation 
of self-interest, we should expect to find, as 
perfection in animal evolution advances, an 
increasing evidence of dutiful co-operation 
in fulfilling the ideals of the Law. And by 
the time that man — babe of a million years' 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 189 

pregnancy — was born into the world, he 
should, we may well argue, manifest a pos- 
sibility of perfection in his prospective man- 
hood. He should, I mean to affirm, if the 
strength of the religious sense was growing 
in him in step equal to his intellectual and 
corporeal excellence, give increasingly de- 
finite evidence of its power to rule his life. 
The automatic religious sense should give 
unequivocal indication of its expanse into a 
conscious ethical sense. The religious sense 
and its influence in ruling individual and 
co-operative life is perfect in sponge and 
flower ; and in many higher forms, such 
as the communities of insects of which I 
shall speak presently, obedience to a law 
transcending personal needs becomes in- 
creasingly manifest. Nevertheless, when 
man is considered as a species, that is, from 
the point of view of such characteristics 



190 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

as are common to every individual, we must 
admit that the religious sense seems to have 
degenerated : whether from lack of use, or 
from the energies of life being devoted to 
the increasing claims of other functions, 
is of no consequence. For if the religious 
sense were paramount in man, as I main- 
tain that it is in the bee, guelder-rose, 
and sponge, it should have obviated in his 
life that very disaster which he has brought 
into the world and fostered as a fine art. 
Man, I say, has brought sin into the world, 
and has sought to make it desirable and 
beautiful that he may justify himself and 
his denials of the Law's impellings. He 
has learned to look upon service as hateful 
except as a means of pleasure. Instead 
of striving to obey in renunciation, he has 
sought to compel his neighbour to renounce. 
He has even laboured to prove that 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 191 

parasitism is praiseworthy: else how this 
universal desire to reap where we have not 
sown, to live on the labour of others ? 

At first sight, I maintain, our belief in 
the religious sense is made absurd when we 
see how it has failed in the finest and latest 
outcome of the Law's operations, when we 
must admit that man, more than any form 
of life, works in opposition to the ideal of 
his nature, and brings disaster upon himself 
and his society. How, we are driven to ask, 
has this disaster become possible if all life 
is still ruled by the Law ? 

A true answer ever lies close to a right 
question. All life, as I have said before, 
lives solely in virtue of its inspiration to serve 
even in the humbler offices of egoism and 
altruism. As soon as these lack inspira- 
tion — that is, the sense of correspondence 
with unknown transcendental ideal — work 



192 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

degenerates in tone and execution, and fails 
to reveal in its expression that beauty 
which should demonstrate the reality of its 
obligation. Thus may uninspired work prove 
actually inimical to the religious sense, and 
bring disaster. 

He who claims that self is all, or that the 
needs of society alone should be considered, 
is uninspired, unevolutional, and spends his 
life more or less in opposition to the higher 
development of the religious sense. Thus 
ultimately he may lose it, and perhaps 
become even incapable of understanding that 
his own lack of a thing does not prove its 
unreality in another. So that we may draw 
this conclusion as to the disaster that has 
befallen us men — that it has come about 
from the lack of inspiration in our work. 
It may be through no fault in a man's 
nature that the religious sense has waned ; 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 193 

it is the fault partly of the environment for 
which man himself is responsible in large 
measure ; partly because he has served self 
and environment without any feeling of the 
inherent nobility in all good work. 

(iii). But, you will tell me, I have given 
you no explanation of the fact that the 
religious sense, the sense of obligation to an 
eternal law in which we are as much and 
as immediately interested as lower forms 
of life, is so little manifest in our work. 
Why does not man, with his supremacy of 
intellect, his command of the earth and 
sea, his harnessing of physical forces and 
driving them chained to his chariot of 
progress, give unequivocal proof of the 
reality as well as the ideality of his needs 
in the transcendental ? I have already 
suggested that the explanation is found in 
man's lack of inspiration to perform his 

13 



194 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

simplest of duties in a strenuous obedience. 
Yet this answer, you will rightly object, is 
no explanation of the fact, seeing that it is 
but a shifting of responsibility of failure from 
man's shoulders on to the Law which should 
give him the needed inspiration. If the 
Law, you contend, had but continued to 
inspire man as it inspires the lowly things 
of life, he had not stumbled upon his 
disaster ; for the Law would never have 
allowed the sense of obligation to the ideal 
to grow weak within him. 

Your contention is just indeed, and, in 
other form, it is but the question which 
every agnostic raises for his vindication ; 
it is but the question which, to my mind 
at any rate, if it cannot be truthfully 
and convincingly answered, justifies the 
fool who said in his heart, " There is 
no God." 



wsm 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 195 

Many a fine man, jealous, passionately 
jealous, for the dignity of the ideal God 
whom he would worship in high devotion 
of service and renunciation if he could but 
find Him proclaimed in all His works, yet 
declares that he cannot believe, because of 
the sin and suffering in the world. If God 
were just and merciful, omnipotent and for- 
bearing, he says, He would never have 
permitted sin to take hold upon His creatures 
and wreck their lives ; if each innocent child 
had a soul which God had given, He would 
strike down all who drive these little 
ones before them into misery and hell ; if 
God exists, He is either not omnipotent or 
not all-loving, or He would not permit vice 
and suffering. And this is the argument 
which, I say, we must squarely face, or give 
up all hope of honest understanding. 

I will give you the answer which to 



196 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

myself at least has made faith possible — nay, 
which has made it imperative and final : 
and I hold no brief for the Almighty. If 
He is all some hope and believe, He 
needs no special pleading : my desire is but 
knowledge of the Truth. 

In answer to this wide-prevailing argument 
against God's love and wisdom, I will re- 
turn to the previous form of the question : 
How has the Law so failed in man that it 
has seemingly left him bereft of this most 
essential of all life's attributes, the in- 
stinctive knowledge of his dependence upon 
and obligation to the eternal law ? 

The Law's ideal in evolving man, after 
all, may be higher than the agnostic's ideal 
of what should imply a perfect God. The 
Law's aim is that man should serve in a 
manner more excellent than can be accom- 
plished by the relative automatism of lesser 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 197 

created things. The Law, for the perfecting 
of creation, has need of a race of men who 
shall be great in so far as each one shall 
manifest the image of God in his person. 
The Law's design of the great structure 
which man, like the sponge-sarcode, is un- 
consciously building, needs for its accom- 
plishment an active understanding of the 
particular work demanded of each handi- 
craftsman. 

If you read Ruskin you will realize at 
once what I mean. He is at pains to show 
us that in every great example of Gothic 
architecture not only is the plan of the 
architect noble, but each individual work- 
man, notwithstanding his lack of knowledge 
of the final outcome, is inspired by the great 
idea and intent of the whole : every line of 
colour in fresco, every blow of chisel on 
stone, every bit of gaudy glass set in 



198 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

mosaic symbol, gives evidence of the intelli- 
gence and willing inspiration of each labourer. 
The architect's idea quickened each workman 
with his own creating power, and each strove 
with each, as he strove with the formless 
stone or naked wall, to excel : not so much 
that he might earn his wage, as masons 
are requited now for their exercise of an 
automatic and mechanical skill, but that he 
might own a share in the completion of a 
mighty work, even though he would perhaps 
not live to see it. 

The Law needs for its work — which is the 
ultimate excellence and joy of all creation 
— labourers that are freed of their chains, 
who have in them the possibility of excelling 
the ungrowing, mechanical average of work. 
This cannot be done by the sponge-sarcode 
or by the guelder-rose, or even by the bee. 
The Law has delegated to man its own 






THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 199 

power, and has freed him of his chains, 
that he may serve in freedom, and proclaim, 
in the beauty of his labour, the religion of 
freedom. 

Hence, notwithstanding its appearance of 
limitation, the Law may yet be justified ; 
and this in spite of the fact that, in giving 
freedom to all, option has become the birth- 
right not only of those masons who create 
beauty, but also of those who mar their 
marble and cast the blame upon the 
Law's limitations. The Law has turned its 
workshop into a co-operative, profit-sharing 
concern of unlimited liability, to the spoiling 
of much of its work, although possibly to 
the ultimate justification of its initial and 
prevailing idea. 

Is the omnipotence of God then limited 
in His work? Must we, because of His 
creatures' freedom to help or to hinder, 



200 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

judge Him to lack power, mercy, and 
wisdom? Could He not have made all 
men free and good, and thus His work 
perfect, without the suffering, misery, and 
failure which stand forth from all the fairness 
of the beautiful earth, and appear to deny 
that the essence of life is right working? 

To make man good without effort of his 
own were a denial of his freedom, for he 
would have no choice and be still chained. 
And it may yet be found that the only 
limitation of eternal power must be in God's 
inability to do what is second best, even 
although the fool thinks he could better 
believe if he had no option in the design 
of the marble he must carve. 

The only form of society in which sin and 
evil could be impossible would be one like 
the insect communities'. Look at the bees. 
We find in them the type of utter devotion 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 201 

to labour in service — to service in renuncia- 
tion. Seldom resting, never complaining, 
they fill their day full of work as their cells 
full of honey. Like these, too, each day is 
closed as an accomplishment in perfection. 
The personal interest of each bee is an un- 
known factor in the community, and each 
enjoys its life in involuntary, ungrudged 
slavery, inspired by an unconscious instinct 
of the hive's needs. The queen sacrifices her 
freedom and delight in flower and sun that 
the Law may be served. The drones wait in 
uninterested passivity till one among them 
shall be chosen for sacrificing his life in 
the office of fertilization ; and only that the 
needs of the Law may be fulfilled. The 
queen invites all drones to fly with her, that 
she may select the fittest for the Law's need ; 
and those who are rejected return to the hive 
to be hustled, starved, tortured, and killed by 



202 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

the workers, because the possibility of the 
drones' use to the community is over. And 
these drones do not even resist, for it is the 
will of their law that they die. Impelled by 
a disinterested automatism, they have no 
wish but submission. 

And so it is throughout this common- 
wealth of bees. The hive has attained the 
happy condition of a perfect socialism ; their 
work is the perfect outcome of a high degree 
of intelligence, and their lives are devoted, 
with microscopic joy and quaint semblance 
of virtue, to the needs of the whole. And 
all their high intelligence, their mathematical 
precision of work, their devoted altruism 
and unemotional transcendentalism, have 
given them nothing of what man prizes as 
his birthright — Freedom — and through it 
consciousness of choice and knowledge of 
consequences. Yet' man casts this priceless 



- 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 203 

gift in the mud, because of the obligations it 
endows him with ; and, having sullied its 
beauty, he then looks upon it as a proof that 
its donor was neither good nor powerful. It 
is because of this very freedom to do or to 
err that sin has come into our existence. 

Would omnipotence be better exemplified, 
I ask you, if men were no more than bees, 
obeying because they must instead of 
because they may ? Which indicates the 
greater power in creating : the bees with 
perfect subservience to the religious sense, or 
man with freedom to grow in fellowship with 
his Maker, even though this very freedom 
bring with it the possibility of living in 
opposition to ideal ? 

(iv). Once upon a time two great chess- 
players entered upon a contest that for all 
time should determine their skill. The laws 
of the game were of their own devising and 



204 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

different from those now holding : for each 
was to carve his own men to the best of his 
ability ; and the skill he manifested in his 
handicraft was to be judged equal with his 
control of the game. Each, moreover, was 
to play on a separate board ; and wise men 
were to be brought to sit as umpires whose 
judgment should be final. Now each 
player carved his men, his kings, queens, 
bishops, knights, castles, and pawns, with 
skill the like of which had not been 
seen before : for an eternity was given to 
each for his work. But when all was in 
readiness and the game should begin, none 
could be found wise enough for umpires : 
though not a few volunteered. And the 
players, for lack of better critics, were 
constrained to this strange agreement, that 
their own chessmen, whom they had 
fashioned, should be their judges. 



_ 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 205 

For awhile the skill of the players 
seemed equal, and the game progressed in 
such profundity of thought and subtlety 
of invention that the chessmen, who, you 
must believe, were endowed with some 
understanding, were so amazed that they 
doubted whether they did not themselves 
initiate their excursions and bold doings. 
But before many aeons had passed over 
this wonderful game, the play of the two 
master-craftsmen became strangely different 
The skill of him who held the red men 
remained as it had begun. His men he 
could count upon to do as he bid them, 
and, in given circumstances, to act as they 
had done a thousand years before. His 
chessboard remained as fair and unsullied 
as when it had first left his workshop at 
the beginning ; and his play was such 
good play that it could hardly be bettered. 



206 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

The board was so bright in colour, sunny 
in light, pleasant to live upon, that the red 
chessmen desired none better, for they also 
remained, as they had begun, masterpieces 
of skill. And they knew that they were so. 

But the player who owned the white 
men was different ; and his work differed, 
though in high honour he still conformed 
with the rules each had agreed upon. As 
he watched the meek submission of his 
men and their obedience to his will, he, 
strange and purposeless though it appeared 
to his opponent, learned to love his poor 
carvings of ivory, and in so doing he 
came to desire something beyond the exercise 
of his own skill and personal power. He, 
foolishly, as was accounted by his opponent 
and indeed as appeared to all the red men 
as well as to many of his own, taught his 
people, kings with their queens, knights in 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 207 

their castles, bishops ministering to pawns, 
to understand the game, so that they should 
choose their own moves. They should think 
out where their own safety lay, because 
their master had need of them ; they should 
look how best to serve those having need 
of their help, so that their master could not 
repent him of the freedom he had given ; 
and lastly, they should, in such service, 
attain a higher understanding to work in 
co-operation with himself, the designer of 
them and their laws. Thus should they 
deepen the intent of the game, and choose 
whether or no they would help their master 
to victory. 

But, you must observe, there arrived an 
inevitable consequence, which had indeed 
been foreseen by the carver of his freed 
chessmen. Though they were still com- 
pelled to move within certain rules and limits 



208 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

prescribed by the game, which rules and 
limits could not be transgressed without 
personal as well as social disaster, they yet 
had choice in their moves and their motives. 
And because many moved foolishly and 
many lazily, because some even chose to 
deny their obligation to obey the rules, 
disaster seemed to assail the game of that 
player who loved his men. And the men 
of both sides declared him to be weak in 
power and foolish in desire ; some even 
said that, had he loved his men as he 
pretended, he would have kept them rigidly 
tied to their obligations. 

And the board of the white men grew 
strange in appearance and mightily unin- 
telligible. The squares became blurred ; for 
the white-daisied meadows grew black with 
soot belched from the tall objects which 
the castles had become, and which the poor 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 209 

pawns half worshipped as the emblems of 
success and progress. The shady woods 
were cut down that fuel might be found 
for the feeding of the chimneys and the 
fouling of the meadows. The rivers that 
marked out the squares on the land grew 
rank with horrors that, in fighting for life, 
had found only death ; and the blue waters 
became red with the streams of greed and 
hatred that poured into them. How so ? 
Because some of the pawns, if one among 
them seemed more favoured of their master, 
would hate, starve, and slay that fellow. 
Some kings, you must observe, grew tyrants, 
and sought to take freedom from any who 
questioned the regal right of exacting service. 
Some knights grew lazy because they, having 
turned their castles of strength into chimneys 
of commercial success, enticed the pawns to 
fuel their furnaces, and thus save themselves 



210 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

from their birthright to work and be free. 

And some bishops, who claimed best to 

understand the will of the master, grew 

greedy also of power, and sought, like the 

kings, to rob the men of their freedom, and 

cast their minds, if not their bodies, in 

chains. They said, " The master may have 

given you freedom of conscience, but we 

must regulate it ! He has certainly given 

you power of reason, but we must endorse 

it ! " Yet, notwithstanding all this seeming 

disaster, the master worked on in the strength 

of his deep intent. " The game is not yet 

played ! " he cried ; " have we not a million 

years before us? If I can show one good 

pawn, bishop, or king who has justified the 

freedom I have given, he is worth more than 

all the automata ; he justifies all my own 

disappointments, all the hard years of my 

labour." 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 211 

But the master of the red men, the red men 
themselves, and indeed many of the white, 
railed at the good master of the white men 
because their whiteness was stained. They 
cried that, had he been omnipotent, he had 
saved his pawns from the tyrannies of those 
he had ordained for their guidance ; that, 
had he been all-loving, he had never allowed 
them to grow greedy and lazy ; that, had 
he been omniscient, he had endowed them 
with such wisdom as would have made them 
understand the folly of bartering the bread 
of life for the Dead-Sea apples of starvation. 

And the white men grew stronger, more 
powerful, and regardless of that freedom 
which was responsible for their growth. 
Nay, they even denied its reality. They 
sold their bodies in slavery, for the sake 
of ease and unearned power, to a Mammon 
that gave them gold ; they sold their minds 



212 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

to spare them the labour of thought ; they 
submitted to false churches that, distrusting 
their privileges, feared freedom because of 
its abuse in licence. 

And there the fable ends. 

Must I, in conventional manner, declare 
the moral? It is as brief as it is obvious. 
In the master of the white men, who soiled 
their gardens and sullied their pristine purity, 
is suggested the idea of a beneficent and 
omnipotent Creator ; while in the maker of 
the red men is symbolized the sort of god 
whom the agnostic would have selected to 
obviate sin and suffering. And I have 
ended my fable at this point, for it merges 
into the actual story of human growth 
and human failure. And hardly, I think, 
were it worth while pursuing our search for 
the truth, whether in Nature, or in men's 
hearts, or in scriptures, but for one fact 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 213 

in our history that has given us knowledge 
of the import of things. You know what 
this fact is — the coming among us of One 
whose personal life was inspired by law 
and revealed in beauty ; whose social life 
was inspired by love of the children of 
men and revealed in sorrow because they 
rejected the truth ; whose oneness with 
eternal Law transcending all mundane 
obligation was revealed in His sacrifice, 
and His going from those He loved, that 
they might grow and learn freedom in 
faith. 

And now we profess devotion to Him and 
the truth with which He inspired men ; 
and the fact, for all the poverty of its fruit, 
is declared in the churches and hospitals 
with which our cities abound. Yet, despite 
the money we give and the noble thoughts 
that inspire those who teach ; despite the 



214 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

great and small deeds in mercy of many 
who obey, most of us still maintain, tacitly 
or openly, that we cannot, in the strange 
necessities of this age, take the injunctions 
of the Sermon on the Mount quite literally. 
And why ? Because we are afraid of taking 
in both hands and holding to our heart the 
priceless gift of freedom. As it appears to 
me, the more profoundly we study fact, and 
the more humbly we wait upon the mini- 
strations of pure science, the more sure shall 
we be that the Sermon on the Mount pro- 
claims the elemental law of life with its 
prospective, evolutional possibilities of eternal 
growth in ever increasing freedom. 

I suspect that some of you men of science 
will think I am exceeding the province of 
my lecture in speaking in such manner ; and 
I suspect also that some of you students 
of theology will feel that I should leave it 



mm 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 215 

to others, more learned and more devout 
than myself, to speak of sacred things. But 
if we would be scientific and honest, we dare 
not disregard one item in man's nature or 
mode of life, whether we consider it as 
artificial, or fanciful, or as the result of his 
fears. All things and all appearances of 
things are facts ; and, to the truly scientific, 
man's renunciation of self is as real a fact, 
though prompted by ideals, as his crimes, 
though accounted for by the faults of 
ancestry and environment. 

Nor must the student of theology think 
that religion lies beyond the pale of the 
scientist's work. He who best trusts his 
religion will least resent its being studied 
with the scalpel, test-tube, and microscope 
of scientific precision. It is, I believe, by 
the scientific method that we shall serve best 
the philosophic understanding of the religious 



216 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

sense ; and, if by such method we find 
that all our inexplicable hopes take origin 
in the depths of an eternal and omnipresent 
Personality, our gain will not be the less 
real that its proof lies beyond the confines 
of our mere intellects. Yet I am not 
saying that it is necessary for all men to 
study these things in the scientific spirit. 
Some, I am prepared to believe, know 
without proof; some, we know, hope with- 
out adducing good reason. Such we need 
not seek to help, seeing that they may, 
notwithstanding their silence, have eyes of 
the eagle ; while we who talk have perhaps 
but the atrophied eyes of the mole. 

I have yet more to say about this freedom 
which I would have you understand is the 
final outcome of our perfecting in the re- 
ligious sense. I want to give you a clue 
to its study in the history of our State and 



■H 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 217 

religion, these being, I maintain, inseparable 
in their growth. This clue will serve for 
the further strengthening of our belief that 
freedom is as essential in our religion as 
renunciation and service. At the same 
time, I shall, I hope, make you understand 
how distinct, in point of natural law, is 
freedom from licence, power from tyranny, 
charity from interested altruism, and pure 
egoism from self-seeking ; and then I shall 
have done. 

The growth of the spirit of freedom 
throughout the history of man is closely 
identified with the growth of power. Even 
the power of France after the Revolution 
was due rather to the freedom of the people 
than to the ambition of Napoleon. That 
the abuse of power is one of the dangers 
in freedom is no argument against the merit 
of freedom. To this I shall again refer. 



2i8 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

I suspect, moreover, when the evolution 
theory comes to be studied with a fine 
philosophic spirit, imbued with the knowledge 
of these latter days, that the whole process 
of increasing excellence will be found to be 
inspired by one great principle, germinal in 
the beginning, fruit-bearing in its consum- 
mation ; and that this great principle is the 
passionate spirit in all life, the irresistible, 
undeniable spirit, to free itself from the 
trammels of its environment, even though this 
environment were made by life for its own 
enlargement ; even though, as the very 
measure of its success, life must make for 
itself new and larger environments for its 
labour, and must forge new chains to awaken 
new needs for the increase of freedom. 

Growth itself may be defined as a dis- 
content with existing conditions and a 
rising above them into larger opportunity. 



Plate VI. 




SECTION OF THE PEARLY NAUTILUS 

{Nautilus pompilius) 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 219 

Conceive of growth or evolution in the light 
of a simple illustration. This pearly nautilus 
(Plate VI.), as you see, is a series of chambers 
strung together, as it were, by a narrow 
passage running through the centre of each, 
but otherwise entirely separate. The mollusc 
that built it occupied each successive chamber 
as it grew bigger, leaving the smaller and 
building the larger on the same plan, but 
with a larger sense of its possibilities. 
Keeping hold, with a strange affection for 
its bygone history, of the chambers it has 
left for ever, the mollusc, unknown to itself, 
constructs a beautiful whole — beautiful be- 
cause, declaring in its symmetry and shape 
some law of spiral growth in evolution, it 
proclaims a deep truth, in the simplicity of 
which we and it hold fellowship. 

But whether or no we regard evolution 
in life as a freeing from existing forces that 



220 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

hinder at the same time that they awaken 
our ideals, the whole of our political and 
religious history in England is a story of 
evolution. And it is the same scheme of 
evolution as of old, though we study it in 
these latter days by the light of facts handed 
down to us, by letter of pen, as distinguished 
from geological imprints on rocky pages. 
Our national story is the history of the 
assertion and evolution of our rights in that 
freedom for which we have been foremost 
among men in staking our lives. 

If our few great men, rather than an innate 
spirit inspiring the people to progress, seem 
to have made our story, it is only so because 
they stand forth as the more potent ex- 
pressions of the fire that is always burning, 
sometimes smouldering and sometimes 
aflame, in the community's depths. Thus 
Stephen Langton, first among the subscribing 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 221 

witnesses of Magna Charta, proclaimed his 
belief in ideal and essential rights to freedom 
when he, with a boldness greater than can 
be realized by us who have done with 
papal assumption, refused to publish the 
excommunication of his colleagues. Great 
though were his life and service to Truth, 
he was but one bigger voice among the 
clamouring multitude who all believed in the 
principles for which he sacrificed his see 
rather than betray. Simon de Montfort, 
again, was spokesman among the barons 
because of his greater daring and stronger 
belief in their need to crush the tyrannies 
of the throne. But why ? Because his sense 
of obligation to birthright was not content 
with smouldering, but must flame up in 
action. His contempt for the Pope and 
rapacities of the throne led to the means 
of our political freedom — those Houses of 



222 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

Parliament which may yet justify our de- 
mocracy when its evolution has outstepped 
greed and mundane expediencies. 

Our political evolution is inseparable from 
our religious freedom ; and I suspect it is 
with a deep sense of the essential fitness of 
this relation that we hold to the union 
of Church and State, though so often each 
seeks to support the other's edifice with 
mimic buttress, as if impelled by fear of 
a common danger in change and growth. 
Dangers there must be ever ahead of us 
if we be free men to carve our future, to 
work out our political and religious salvation. 
But the dangers will never be more than are 
profitable for us to contend with, and cannot 
be compared for a moment with the disasters 
attendant upon stagnation and quelling of 
the life that must be always agrowing if it 
would live. 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 223 

Each step of advance in our growth has 
been a step onwards in emancipation ; and 
because of the frequent, though, I think, 
but temporary, failure of our ideals, we need 
not doubt that the religious sense is inspiring 
us to this emancipation. Even in the Tudor 
days the increasing power of the throne was 
not incompatible with the growing freedom 
of mind, the strengthening of ideal, and the 
reality of the religious sense. In the Great 
Rebellion, again, the inherent union of this 
sense with the feeling after political freedom 
as a moral necessity, was hardly shaken by 
the tyrannies of an army, many of whose 
privates were real saints and generals true 
patriots ; nor yet by the senseless restraints 
imposed by the shackles of Calvinism upon 
a people craving for freedom. 

Again, in the days of the Restoration, when 
the religious sense slumbered and piety was 



224 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

derided ; when the people, longing once 
more for colour and gaiety, with liberty to 
choose and expand, turned from the deep 
inspiration of their fathers and accepted 
the licence of court negligence as the only 
desirable alternative — even then the spirit 
of freedom was still moving, in spite of 
political decay and fashionable immorality. 
As if the knowledge of man's obligation 
to assert his rights were a vital force that 
must have outlet, the spirit of freedom leapt 
into life and took form in scientific investiga- 
tion. For although the Royal Society had 
first been inaugurated some fifteen years 
before the accession of Charles the Second, 
it was the black days of his shadow which 
granted its Charter (1660); and the intent 
of the early Fellows, as is the intent of 
those in our day, was the pursuit of 
knowledge after the methods of Francis 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 225 

Bacon, " in a spirit admirably com- 
pounded," says Macaulay, " of audacity and 
sobriety." 

And I maintain that, dark though those 
days were, the desire for freedom joined 
hands with the religious sense, and inspired 
the pure investigation of Nature, untram- 
melled by self-interest, money-making, or 
advantage to society. William Harvey's 
treatise on the circulation of the blood had 
indeed appeared some thirty years earlier, 
marking almost the first real step towards 
founding a science of physiology (1628) ; 
but it needed that common desire for 
knowledge which was awakened by Bacon's 
Novum Organum, rather than academic 
learning, to produce the handful of great 
men who were to little London in their 
day what her philosophers were to little 
Athens in the fifth century B.C. — in each 

15 



226 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

case sufficient to make great for all time 
the name of their country. 

When I name Newton, first to unite high 
mathematics with experimental investigation ; 
Edmund Halley and John Flamsteed, the 
astronomers ; Robert Boyle, the father of 
modern chemistry and founder of the Boyle 
lectures ; Sloane, the naturalist, and Wallis, 
the mathematician and founder of the Royal 
Society ; when we see how prelates, jurists, 
statesmen, and princes vied with one another, 
not merely in patronizing science, but in 
taking active share in its pursuit, we find even 
those days of waning morality and aban- 
doned democracy giving evidence of some 
truth in desire, and setting indeed a lesson to 
this age when science is pursued as a means 
of emolument, and preachers of religion 
await in fear the revelations of experimental 
research. Our science, I think, to attain the 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 227 

highest, must be pure and freed from self- 
interest, no less than must our work for 
society and truth. And so far as the Royal 
Society began its work in this spirit, it 
served, I believe, even in those days, the 
religious sense which has never entirely 
slept even in our times of direst degradation. 
But whatever movement we have ever 
made that has tended to progress — and by 
progress we as philosophers dare not think 
in the first place of riches or extent of 
domain — it has always come to us because 
some were found strong to dare all in the 
justification of their faith, and only because 
they felt within them that inherent need of 
serving their ideals. Even if we assert that 
some great movements were effected through 
the intensity of the egoistic sense of an 
individual — as, for instance, in Henry the 
Eighth — and that no spirit of idealism or 



228 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

desire for social advance or hope for personal 
excellence inspired such a one to his course of 
action, I do not think it spoils my argument. 
For notwithstanding that king's self-serving 
and moral degradation, the spirit of virtuous, 
personal independence so typically English 
was strong within him. In daring to with- 
stand the Pope, in daring to scoff at his ex- 
communication, he but typified the spirit that 
was virile in our world ; and for him, although 
a crowned head, to dare question the word 
of one who in the eyes of all Christendom 
was supreme to kings and emperors, was a 
noble act, despite its self-interest. 

But the nobility of Henry lay in his 
egoistic strength of mind rather than in 
a spiritual force of soul. It could not be 
placed alongside the noble altruism of 
the great commoners of a century later, 
who taught the people that they must not 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 229 

submit to the king's prerogatives when these 
necessitated wrongs to his people, nor accept 
his lies as privileged, and the shackling of 
their liberty as the will of God. Neither 
can Henry's boldness nor Hampden and 
Pym's devotion, great though their con- 
sequences have been in the making of our 
Church and State, rank with the starved 
Monk of Wittenberg's transcendentalism. 
Worn with self-tumult, fastings, and prayer, 
yet not the less loving life, peace, and the 
fairness of the earth, Luther stood alone 
before the Diet at Worms, with all the 
dazzling pomp of Christendom sitting in 
judgment of his heresies, and cried : " Unless 
I be convinced by Scripture and reason, I 
neither can nor dare retract anything ; for 
my conscience is a captive to Gods word" — 
a creed which then gave, and for all time 
has given, heart to Truth in her struggle 



230 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

against the incrusting dogmas of scholasti- 
cism ; against the worship of forms of 
religion, forms of learning, forms of science, 
which seek to proclaim their vitality in 
outward and visible show of ephemeral 
grandeur. 

Believe me, the principles of protestantism 
are still strong within us, in our religion, 
our state, and our science ; and they must 
be strong if we would grow as individuals or 
as a nation. And, believe me, the principles 
of democracy must as certainly be strong 
within us if our religious sense is to have 
freedom to grow. And when I say the 
principles of protestantism and democracy, I 
do not mean to offer one word or another 
concerning dogmas which may or may not 
be the outcome of these principles. I do 
not stand in criticism of the teachings of 
theology, nor do I pronounce opinion upon 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 231 

this or that political measure or party. The 
principles of anything are the germinal 
beginnings which gave rise to that thing and 
inspire it throughout the whole period of its 
vitality. And the principles of protestantism 
are the principles of democracy ; they are the 
freedom to be guided by the Law — freedom 
to do that to which all are inspired by the 
elemental and dominant force of life. The 
principle of life is freedom to grow in 
obedience. The principle of protestantism 
is the right of the individual to think in 
accordance with the light given his mind 
and his conscience, provided these stand 
disciplined in humility and reverential before 
the Law. The principle of democracy is 
the right of the individual to act as his 
sense of right instructs him, provided he 
looks upon charity as the beacon-light of 
conduct. Both protestantism and democracy 



232 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

are incompatible with self-seeking or the 
lust of power or the craving for unearned 
riches. Both protestantism and democracy, 
I hold — and some at least among you will 
not dispute it — can exist in purity only when 
their meaning is defined in the words of the 
Sermon on the Mount, despite the arguments 
of the political economist as to the unpractical 
nature of its doctrines. 

Protestantism and democracy, then, 
whether judged in the light of Christ's 
teachings or in the spirit of philosophic 
freedom, mean but one thing : the eternal 
worth of the individual in the cosmic Law. 
To hold that man's chief value lies in the 
fact that he is an item in the construction 
of a whole, be that whole a church or a state, 
is, if you allow the theory its logical con- 
clusion, to justify clericalism on the one 
hand, socialism on the other ; and both 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 233 

represent the very antithesis of that indi- 
vidualism which I say is the basis of 
Christianity, the spirit of protestantism, the 
aim of democracy. The Church, you will 
surely admit, exists more for the sake of 
the individuals composing it than for 
glorifying God apart from their welfare ; 
and the State stands mainly for the sake 
of justifying and encouraging the personal 
rights of its component members, however 
expedient it may appear to repress the 
starving and restrict the vicious that the 
mighty may sit comfortably in their seats. 
Conceive of the medical profession existing 
primarily for its colleges and hospitals and 
practitioners, rather than for its patients ! 
or even for the understanding of disease 
rather than for the relief of suffering ! Con- 
ceive of railways being justified in their 
dividends, rather than in the needs of those 



234 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

who would travel ! Both Church and State 
stand solely because of the needs of the 
failing and suffering ; they are human institu- 
tions, and will prove the more truly so as 
their members obey their religious sense, 
and know both Church and State to be 
divine because inspired by the eternal Law. 

Before I close I must gather some of 
my threads together, especially because, in 
speaking of freedom, I may appear to have 
wandered from my initial argument, and 
to have lost sight of the point I set out to 
prove — viz. that the religious sense is as 
much part of our inheritance as any other 
of our vital attributes. 

It may appear to some that the very 
idea of freedom implies a sense inimical to 
that of obligation and obedience ; you may 
say that our only thought, when we desire 
freedom, is to be quit of our obligations, 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 235 

even if these be the exalted obligations of 
service, but especially if they necessitate 
renunciation of individual rights. But if 
you claim this, you are putting an inter- 
pretation upon the word freedoin which is 
not sanctioned by reason. I conceive that 
in your sense of the word you would wish 
to be free to choose what you would have, 
uninfluenced by any impulsion or obliga- 
tion from the outside : for to be impelled 
by any motive whatever is to be a slave 
to that motive. In other words, you would 
prefer to act without any definite purpose 
in view : for to have purpose would be, 
for you, to act under obligation to that 
purpose, which is the reductio ad absurdum. 
Not God Himself can act without the motive 
and obligation of His purpose ; and therefore, 
according to your idea of freedom, no divine 
being, however omnipotent, could be really 



236 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

free in action unless untrammelled by obliga- 
tion and motive — unless, indeed, you can 
imagine a God who should create without 
any idea of what He was going to make ! 

No, the whole conception of freedom is 
opportunity to grow in obedience to the 
law of our highest nature, unhindered, 
except so far as hindrances that we can 
overcome will strengthen in us the power 
to grow. A man's freedom is shown not 
in carving out his own fancied idea of 
what is good for him, but in choosing 
which course he will pursue : the easy and 
slothful and parasitic, which will save him 
from the labour of obedience and that 
increase of obligation which work eternally 
brings ; or the difficult, strenuous, and in- 
dependent course, in the pursuit of which 
he attains freedom and power in an in- 
creasing conformity with the eternal Will. 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 237 

The subject is vast, and I would willingly 
say much more upon it if time were at 
our disposal. Suffice it to say now that it 
needs no special pleading, casuistry, or 
philosophic apology to make the truth of 
it apparent ; for everyone who seeks freedom 
knows that my words are true, and that 
the only way of obtaining freedom lies in 
strenuous obedience to the Law, whose 
purpose in us is the evolution of our growth. 
The Buddhist's conception of the ideal 
desired by one who sacrifices all earthly joy 
to the attainment of this ideal, is freedom ; 
and, different though the Oriental passivity 
is from the Western activity in matters of 
life and religion, their ultimate ideals do not 
widely differ. In both, the service of others 
and the renunciation of self are the only 
possible stepping-stones to the attainment 
of that freedom which is but co-operation 



238 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

with the Law that all Nature obeys, and 
which has, in its power of service, created 
all things. 

Whatever system of philosophy we patro- 
nize or form of faith we embrace, as practical 
men and women with ideals transcending 
our personal success, we shall all admit that 
freedom can be reached only in the renuncia- 
tion of self-seeking. Quite as surely, and 
judging in like spirit, we perceive that the 
only form of effective renunciation is that 
which is necessitated by service to our 
neighbour and the Law under which we 
serve. While we believe that the higher life 
is found only by losing the lower from which 
we arise, we must, I think, no less hold that 
the only asceticism consonant with the Law 
is that which is sought because a means to 
fruitful service, and not for its purposeless 
starving either of body or soul. 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 239 

" And yet," you will say in a last desire 
to be absolutely truthful, " look what freedom 
brings in its train ! Were it not better for 
us to be a socialistic community of bees, 
where all are equal, where rapacity and vice 
are made impossible by a rigid mechanical 
repression ? What profits us our liberty 
when the fruit of its immediate germina- 
tion is licence ? What profits power 
when those who attain it degrade it into 
tyranny ? " 

These questions which you ask are but 
questions concerning our limitations and 
that extraordinary tendency in all life to 
pursue the easy way rather than the road 
leading upwards to excellence. The higher 
we ascend in our evolution, the greater is 
the demand upon us for growth ; and, as 
the inevitable corollary of this truth, the 
greater is the fall if we lose hold of our ideal. 



240 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

At each stage of our increasing freedom 
we acquire an increase in power of choice ; 
for we are learning to take share in the 
eternal purpose. The greater our freedom 
the greater our power — for good or for 
evil. The higher we have reached in width 
of life, and the greater our attainment of 
intellectual and ethical riches, the greater 
the possibility in us of using that power 
well or ill. 

And if we use our gifts ill, the greater 
they be, the deeper will be the prostitution 
of our ideal. If obedience to physiological 
needs is degraded, the worship of self is 
instituted and the dignity of the individual 
is shamed. If obedience to that instinctive 
social sense which is something akin to love 
is admitted for the sake of the comfort and 
peace it brings, and not from an inherent 
desire for neighbourly service, it becomes 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 241 

mechanical and unevolutional ; and the pro- 
gress of the Law is arrested. If the freedom 
our ancestors have won for us over tyrants, 
ignorance and vice is utilized for the sake 
of the power it has given us to tyrannize 
and dogmatize, or to justify our vices as 
natural law, then is Freedom prostituted 
into licence, and her devotees, once strong 
in the strength which comes of freedom 
earned in obedience to a just master, 
become slaves to the tyrant No-law. 

And yet another last word I would say to 
you students — and God help us who would 
teach if we be not also students among 
you ! — do not let us think that evolution is 
consummated in our own persons or our 
society ; do not let us imagine that political 
freedom is yet won ; do not let us think the 
Law has set limitations upon the work it 
would accomplish ; do not let us drift into 

16 



242 THE RELIGIOUS SENSE 

philosophical contentment with our world, 
and think that things, dogmas and limita- 
tions must be accepted merely because they 
have stood the test of time, or because we 
do not see how they can be bettered. We 
must still be protestants if we would grow ; 
and, alas ! we must still make blunders and 
amend them if we would learn. There are 
still as many and as mighty lies besetting 
us as were ever slain by the prophets. And 
if our protestantism is strong within us, if 
it lives in virtue of our earning freedom 
in an increase of service, we need not fear 
our evolution. 

As our password into the realms of know- 
ledge, as our beacon amidst the dark paths 
of conflicting obligations, as our sword in 
the struggles with material needs and 
temptations, we may hold in our hearts that 
saying of Martin Luther through which 



THE RELIGION OF FREEDOM 243 

must come freedom to churches, states, and 
schools : " My conscience is a captive to 
God's word." 



Finis. 



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